About this session

**Anthropic's CCA Exam: A Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering** The Claude Certified Architect (CCA) exam distills what Anthropic has learned from working with the AI companies shipping agents to production — the patterns that work, the anti-patterns that quietly burn tokens and trust, and the architectural decisions that separate demos from systems you'd stake a quarter on. This talk treats the exam as a field guide for agentic engineering, whether or not you ever sit for it. We'll walk through the five competency domains the exam tests — Agentic Architecture, Tool Design and MCP Integration, Claude Code, Prompt Engineering, and Context Management — with particular emphasis on multi-agent orchestration, subagent delegation, tool schema design, and lifecycle hooks. We'll then work through the six real-world scenarios the exam uses to probe judgment, each organized around an anti-pattern: the seductive-but-wrong move that looks reasonable until it costs you a production incident. Attendees leave with a working mental model of the agentic surface area and a checklist of the failure modes that matter most when moving from prototype to production. **Who should attend:** engineers and architects building agentic systems with Claude or other frontier models, technical leads evaluating agent designs, and developers considering the CCA credential.

Topics

Speaker

Frank Coyle

Computer Science Educator; Founder, The AI Edge · University California Berkeley