The 80/20 of the certification

If you only have a weekend, here's the high-yield set. Drill these until automatic.

The twelve

1. Agent vs. workflow — pick based on whether routing depends on runtime data.
2. Orchestrator-worker — for independent, parallelizable shards with light shared context.
3. Evaluator-optimizer — bounded to ≤3 iterations.
4. Tool error contracts — error_code, message, hint.
5. Resource vs. tool — read-only addressable → resource; side-effect → tool.
6. MCP transports — stdio local, HTTPS remote.
7. Hooks — PreToolUse, PostToolUse, UserPromptSubmit, exit-non-zero blocks.
8. Skills vs. slash commands — skill = "knows how"; slash = "do it now".
9. Prompt cache — 5-min TTL, prefix match, static-first ordering.
10. Structured output — schema + example + Zod validation + 1 retry.
11. Context headroom — target ~70% utilization.
12. Safe rollouts — shadow → 1% → 10% → 100% with quality + cost gates.

If you can teach each of these in your own words in 90 seconds, you'll pass.