Claude Certified Architect – Foundations Questions and Answers
You are building developer productivity tools using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent helps engineers explore unfamiliar codebases, understand legacy systems, generate boilerplate code, and automate repetitive tasks. It uses the built-in tools (Read, Write, Bash, Grep, Glob) and integrates with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
An engineer’s exploration subagent spent 30 minutes analyzing a legacy payment system, reading 47 files and documenting data flows. The session was interrupted when the engineer’s connection dropped. While away, a teammate merged a PR that renamed two utility functions. The engineer wants to continue the same exploration.
What’s the most effective approach?
You are building a customer support resolution agent using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent handles high-ambiguity requests like returns, billing disputes, and account issues. It has access to your backend systems through custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools ( get_customer , lookup_order , process_refund , escalate_to_human ). Your target is 80%+ first-contact resolution while knowing when to escalate.
During a billing dispute resolution, your agent successfully retrieves customer info via get_customer and order details via lookup_order , but when attempting to call process_refund , the tool returns a timeout error. The agent has enough information to explain the charges and verify refund eligibility, but cannot actually process the refund due to the backend failure.
What approach best balances first-contact resolution with appropriate error handling?
You are building a structured data extraction system using Claude. The system extracts information from unstructured documents, validates the output using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) schemas, and maintains high accuracy. It must handle edge cases gracefully and integrate with downstream systems.
The system routes documents with extraction confidence below 85% to human review. A quarterly audit reveals that 12% of high-confidence extractions (≥85%) also contain errors—cases where the model finds plausible-but-incorrect values. Error sources vary: comparison tables showing competitor specs, appendices referencing different product variants, and ambiguous phrasing the model misinterprets. You need a sustainable strategy to catch these high-confidence errors and measure whether improvements reduce the error rate over time.
What approach is most effective?
You are building a structured data extraction system using Claude. The system extracts information from unstructured documents, validates the output using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) schemas, and maintains high accuracy. It must handle edge cases gracefully and integrate with downstream systems.
Your system has been operating with 100% human review for 3 months. Analysis shows that extractions with model confidence ≥90% have 97% accuracy overall. To reduce reviewer workload, you plan to automate high-confidence extractions.
Before deploying, what validation step is most critical?
You are using Claude Code to accelerate software development. Your team uses it for code generation, refactoring, debugging, and documentation. You need to integrate it into your development workflow with custom slash commands, CLAUDE.md configurations, and understand when to use plan mode vs direct execution.
Your team frequently migrates React components to Vue. You’ve written a step-by-step workflow for Claude Code to follow during each migration, and you want every developer on the team to invoke it by typing /migrate-component . The workflow should stay in sync as the team iterates on it.
Where should you place the skill file?
You are using Claude Code to accelerate software development. Your team uses it for code generation, refactoring, debugging, and documentation. You need to integrate it into your development workflow with custom slash commands, CLAUDE.md configurations, and understand when to use plan mode vs direct execution.
You’re implementing a new payment processing module that must follow your project’s established patterns for database transactions, error handling, and audit logging. You’ve identified three existing modules that exemplify these patterns: db_utils.py , error_handlers.py , and audit_logger.py . This is a one-off integration task—these patterns are well-documented in your team wiki and don’t need additional project-level documentation.
What’s the most effective approach?
You are using Claude Code to accelerate software development. Your team uses it for code generation, refactoring, debugging, and documentation. You need to integrate it into your development workflow with custom slash commands, CLAUDE.md configurations, and understand when to use plan mode vs direct execution.
You need to add a date validation check ensuring event dates are in the future. This requires adding a conditional statement to one existing function in a single file.
What is the most appropriate approach?
You are building a customer support resolution agent using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent handles high-ambiguity requests like returns, billing disputes, and account issues. It has access to your backend systems through custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools ( get_customer , lookup_order , process_refund , escalate_to_human ). Your target is 80%+ first-contact resolution while knowing when to escalate.
A customer raises three separate issues during one session: a refund inquiry (turns 1–15), a subscription question (turns 16–30), and a payment method update (turns 31–45). At turn 48, the customer asks “What happened with my refund?” The conversation is approaching context limits.
What strategy best maintains the agent’s ability to address all issues throughout the session?
You are using Claude Code to accelerate software development. Your team uses it for code generation, refactoring, debugging, and documentation. You need to integrate it into your development workflow with custom slash commands, CLAUDE.md configurations, and understand when to use plan mode vs direct execution.
A security audit requires updating your authentication library from v2 to v3. The migration guide documents breaking changes: authenticate() now returns a Promise instead of accepting a callback, the User type has restructured fields, and three deprecated methods were removed. Grep shows the library is imported in 45 files across several modules.
What’s the most effective approach?
You are building a structured data extraction system using Claude. The system extracts information from unstructured documents, validates the output using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) schemas, and maintains high accuracy. It must handle edge cases gracefully and integrate with downstream systems.
Your extraction pipeline validates outputs against JSON schemas, but you need to implement human review given limited reviewer capacity (they can handle approximately 5% of total extraction volume).
What’s the most effective basis for selecting which extractions to route for human review?
You are building a customer support resolution agent using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent handles high-ambiguity requests like returns, billing disputes, and account issues. It has access to your backend systems through custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools ( get_customer , lookup_order , process_refund , escalate_to_human ). Your target is 80%+ first-contact resolution while knowing when to escalate.
During testing, you find that when a customer says “I need a refund for my recent purchase,” the agent calls process_refund immediately—but populates the required order_id parameter with a plausible-looking but fabricated value instead of first calling lookup_order to retrieve the actual order ID. The refund call fails because the fabricated ID doesn’t exist.
Which change directly addresses the root cause of the agent fabricating the order_id value?
You are building a structured data extraction system using Claude. The system extracts information from unstructured documents, validates the output using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) schemas, and maintains high accuracy. It must handle edge cases gracefully and integrate with downstream systems.
Your extraction system implements automatic retries when validation fails. On each retry, the specific validation error is appended to the prompt. This retry-with-error-feedback approach resolves most failures within 2–3 attempts.
For which failure pattern would additional retries be LEAST effective?
You are building a customer support resolution agent using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent handles high-ambiguity requests like returns, billing disputes, and account issues. It has access to your backend systems through custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools ( get_customer , lookup_order , process_refund , escalate_to_human ). Your target is 80%+ first-contact resolution while knowing when to escalate.
Compliance requires that refunds exceeding $500 must automatically escalate to a human agent—this rule cannot be left to model discretion. Despite clear system prompt instructions, production logs show the agent occasionally processes high-value refunds directly (3% failure rate).
How should you achieve guaranteed compliance?
You are building a customer support resolution agent using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent handles high-ambiguity requests like returns, billing disputes, and account issues. It has access to your backend systems through custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools (get_customer, lookup_order, process_refund, escalate_to_human). Your target is 80%+ first-contact resolution while knowing when to escalate.
After expanding the agent’s MCP tools with delivery-specific capabilities (check_delivery_status, contact_driver, issue_credit, apply_promo_code, update_delivery_address, reschedule_delivery), the total tool count has grown from 4 to 10. Your evaluation suite shows tool selection accuracy has dropped from 88% to 71%. Log analysis reveals the majority of errors involve the agent selecting between semantically overlapping tools—calling issue_credit when process_refund was correct, and calling check_delivery_status when lookup_order already returns the needed data.
Which approach structurally eliminates the semantic overlap identified in the logs as the error source?
You are building a customer support resolution agent using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent handles high-ambiguity requests like returns, billing disputes, and account issues. It has access to your backend systems through custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools ( get_customer , lookup_order , process_refund , escalate_to_human ). Your target is 80%+ first-contact resolution while knowing when to escalate.
You’re implementing the escalation logic for when the agent should call escalate_to_human . Your team proposes four different approaches for triggering escalation.
Which approach will most reliably identify cases that genuinely require human intervention?
You are building developer productivity tools using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent helps engineers explore unfamiliar codebases, understand legacy systems, generate boilerplate code, and automate repetitive tasks. It uses the built-in tools (Read, Write, Bash, Grep, Glob) and integrates with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
Your agent has analyzed a complex service module—reading 23 source files, tracing request flows, and identifying error handling patterns. A developer wants to compare two testing strategies before committing to one: end-to-end tests with mocked external services vs. snapshot tests capturing expected outputs. They need to independently develop both approaches to evaluate trade-offs.
How should you manage the sessions?
You are building developer productivity tools using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent helps engineers explore unfamiliar codebases, understand legacy systems, generate boilerplate code, and automate repetitive tasks. It uses the built-in tools (Read, Write, Bash, Grep, Glob) and integrates with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
After integrating a local MCP server providing code analysis tools ( analyze_dependencies , find_dead_code , calculate_complexity ), you verify the server is healthy and tools appear in the tools/list response. However, you observe that the agent consistently uses Grep to search for import statements instead of calling analyze_dependencies —even when users explicitly ask about “code dependencies.” Examining tool definitions reveals:
MCP analyze_dependencies – “Analyzes dependency graph”
Built-in Grep – “Search file contents for a pattern using regular expressions. Returns matching lines with line numbers and surrounding context.”
What’s the most effective approach to improve the agent’s selection of MCP tools?
You are building developer productivity tools using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent helps engineers explore unfamiliar codebases, understand legacy systems, generate boilerplate code, and automate repetitive tasks. It uses the built-in tools (Read, Write, Bash, Grep, Glob) and integrates with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
An engineer asks the agent to find all callers of a function before removing it. The function is defined in a core library but is also exposed through wrapper modules that rename the function for domain-specific use (e.g., calculateTax in the library becomes computeOrderTax in the orders module).
What exploration strategy will most reliably identify all callers?