The Claude Certified Architect Foundations exam (CCAR-F, also called CCA-F) does not test syntax. It asks you to pick the right design for production scenarios, 60 times in 120 minutes. This course trains you to make those calls and pass on your first attempt.

Every topic starts with a failure from one of the six official scenarios, like a support agent approving a refund it should have blocked. Then you see the fix in a real VS Code project, not notebooks, since that is where Claude Code, MCP, and CI run. Exam Trap breakdowns show the tempting wrong answer and why it loses.

How we cover all five exam domains

• Agentic Architecture and Orchestration (27%): agent loops and stop_reason, coordinator and subagent designs, context passing, and hooks that enforce rules a prompt cannot guarantee.

• Tool Design and MCP Integration (18%): tool descriptions Claude picks correctly, helpful error responses, and MCP servers with tools, resources, and prompts.

• Claude Code Configuration and Workflows (20%): CLAUDE .md, rules, settings, slash commands, and Skills in a real demo repo, plus Claude Code in CI/CD.

• Prompt Engineering and Structured Output (20%): a five-step ladder from clear instructions up to schema enforcement, plus validation retry loops and the Message Batches API.

• Context Management and Reliability (15%): what context costs, why a bigger window is not always the fix, keeping key facts intact in long sessions, and when to escalate to a human.

Practice and labs

Lessons end with exam-style questions where we eliminate wrong answers out loud. You also get domain quizzes and two 60-question mock exams that mirror the real exam, with detailed explanations.

In hands-on labs, you build a support agent, a multi-agent research pipeline, a CI review job, and a data extraction pipeline. The demo code defaults to the low-cost Haiku model to keep API costs down.

The course sticks to exam scope, so fine-tuning and model training are mentioned, not taught, and it stays updated as Claude Code and the exam change.

Watch the free previews to see if my teaching style suits you.

This is an independent prep course, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.