Certifications/Claude Certified Architect — Foundations (CCAR-F)/Study Track

Study Track

1.Study the decisions, not the vocabulary

2.Choose the smallest surface that carries the workload

3.Spend capability where errors are costly

4.Turn a request into a testable contract

5.Place each fact in the right type of context

6.Validate claims, not confidence

7.The Messages API is a state machine

8.Structured output is an untrusted contract by default

9.A tool loop is controlled delegation

10.MCP decouples capability from host

11.The Agent SDK is a harness, not a permission slip

12.Security lives outside the prompt

13.Evals turn agent behavior into engineering evidence

14.Claude Code scales through shared constraints

15.Multi-agent orchestration is about when NOT to use multiple agents

16.Resume or fork without carrying stale context

17.A tool error is also a response

18.Scope is part of the answer

19.A single good result is not evidence of reliability

20.Make long context observable

21.Defend an architecture across six contexts