What to study first for the Claude Certified Architect exam
Start with agentic patterns and tool design — they're the two biggest scoring blocks and the most transferable to real work.
Of the five exam domains, Agentic Architecture (27%) and Tool Design / MCP (18%) account for nearly half the points. They're also the two areas where the gap between "I've read the docs" and "I've shipped this" is largest. Start here, then move to Claude Code, then prompts, then context management.
Day 1: agent vs. workflow
Get crisp on when to give the model autonomy and when to pin the sequence in code. Read our lesson and build the smallest example of each.
Day 2: orchestrator-worker
Build a tiny fan-out: one orchestrator dispatching to three workers. Measure the marshalling overhead.
Day 3: tool schemas
Design and unit-test five tools with intent-revealing names and explicit error contracts.
Keep going lesson by lesson — don't skip the embedded checks.