Complete preparation guide for the Claude Certified Architect: Foundations exam. Five domains, eight scenarios, and the insider patterns that separate a passing score from a perfect one.
The Claude Certified Architect Foundations exam: format, scoring, five domains, eight scenarios, and how to register. Everything you need before you open a study guide.
The two heaviest exam domains: stop_reason control flow, hub-and-spoke multi-agent design, hooks versus prompts, CLAUDE.md hierarchy, path-scoped rules, and CI/CD integration. Together these cover 47 percent of the exam.
Tool descriptions as the primary selection mechanism, MCP configuration and transport selection, JSON schema design for structured output, few-shot versus descriptive instructions, batch API tradeoffs, and validation-retry loops. Together these cover 38 percent of the exam.
Context management patterns, the lost-in-the-middle effect, all eight production scenarios with key patterns, the most common wrong-answer traps, and the exam-day tactics that separate high scores from borderline passes.