u/hartmanma

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Last time I posted about the Claude Certified Architect Professional exam, I mentioned I couldn't talk about the specifics of the exam due to the NDA you agree to when taking the test. After helpful feedback (see above), I realized that the Skilljar material is gated to partners, but it isn't under an NDA.

I honestly loved the content and was glad I went through it. It wasn't super Anthropic specific. Sure there were a few questions about Sonnet vs Opus, but generally speaking it was about designing great AI solutions. I think it is a shame that Anthropic gated it, so I took the exam guide and the objective list and wrote my own explanations of them using Claude Code so anyone could check it out and maybe take something from it.

I also have some inline thoughts about how the exam covers different sections based on my real experience. There are question types that don't show up in practice exams, like yes / no matrix where you judge statements independently. There is a big focus on phase gated questions (based on this point in the lifecycle what should you do?). Another key is to start with the last sentence of the question and then reread because then you know what to look for.

I have it here. No sign up, no email capture. https://aicertificates.study/ccar-p-study-guide

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Last time I posted about the Claude Certified Architect Professional exam, I mentioned I couldn't talk about the specifics of the exam due to the NDA you agree to when taking the test. After helpful feedback (see above), I realized that the Skilljar material is gated to partners, but it isn't under an NDA.

I honestly loved the content and was glad I went through it. It wasn't super Anthropic specific. Sure there were a few questions about Sonnet vs Opus, but generally speaking it was about designing great AI solutions. I think it is a shame that Anthropic gated it, so I took the exam guide and the objective list and wrote my own explanations of them using Claude Code so anyone could check it out and maybe take something from it.

I also have some inline thoughts about how the exam covers different sections based on my real experience. There are question types that don't show up in practice exams, like yes / no matrix where you judge statements independently. There is a big focus on phase gated questions (based on this point in the lifecycle what should you do?). Another key is to start with the last sentence of the question and then reread because then you know what to look for.

I have it here. No sign up, no email capture. https://aicertificates.study/ccar-p-study-guide

>me: passed the cert, AMA
you: what's on it?
me: NDA
you: what should we study?
me: NDA
you: anyway, great post right

Last time I posted about the Claude Certified Architect Professional exam, I mentioned I couldn't talk about the specifics of the exam due to the NDA you agree to when taking the test. After helpful feedback (see above), I realized that the Skilljar material is gated to partners, but it isn't under an NDA.

I honestly loved the content and was glad I went through it. It wasn't super Anthropic specific. Sure there were a few questions about Sonnet vs Opus, but generally speaking it was about designing great AI solutions. I think it is a shame that Anthropic gated it, so I took the exam guide and the objective list and wrote my own explanations of them using Claude Code so anyone could check it out and maybe take something from it.

I also have some inline thoughts about how the exam covers different sections based on my real experience. There are question types that don't show up in practice exams, like yes / no matrix where you judge statements independently. There is a big focus on phase gated questions (based on this point in the lifecycle what should you do?). Another key is to start with the last sentence of the question and then reread because then you know what to look for.

I have it here. No sign up, no email capture. https://aicertificates.study/ccar-p-study-guide

Sat it at a Pearson VUE test center and passed with 965/1000 (720 to pass). Most of what I've seen on here is about Foundations, so here's the Professional. No exam content (it's under NDA) just format, prep, and what surprised me.

Two formats I hadn't drilled. A yes/no matrix — five statements, judge each independently. And drop-down matching, where you classify each scenario from a shared option set and options get reused. Don't assume one-to-one mapping.

Lots of phase-gate questions. "You're at this stage — which two things belong here, before the next stage?" Distractors are usually things that legitimately belong later. Knowing what happens when in the lifecycle matters more than I expected.

Tactic that actually helped: read the last sentence of the stem first, then read the whole thing. A lot of the middle is context you don't need, and knowing the ask first tells you what to extract.

My biggest weakness, in case it's yours: I kept picking the pragmatic mitigation over the structural fix. Retries instead of a durable queue. A summarizer instead of not feeding the coordinator raw data. A reconciliation pass instead of collapsing the work into one call. All things I'd genuinely ship, all of which reduce how often the failure happens without stopping it. Writing down "does my answer still let the failure keep being generated?" was worth more than any other single thing I did.

Prep: read the official material once, carefully. Do the four prerequisite courses — genuinely useful. Then practice tests until your weak domains show up in the per-domain breakdown. I did about ten.

Test center over online. No room scanning, no environment fiddling. Would do it again.

Domains that felt heaviest: integration, retrieval, prompt/config, stakeholder, and several fairness questions.

Happy to answer anything that doesn't cross the NDA.

Just published, free on Amazon Kindle this week.... leave a review if helpful! This is basically a walkthrough of Moonlings, which was built using Claude Code and runs on Claude Managed Agents.

Anyone can demo an AI agent. Almost no one can run one.

Most tutorials stop at the same place: a loop that calls a model, runs a tool, and prints to a terminal. That's the first afternoon. This book is about everything after — how to build, ship, and operate AI agents that run unattended, in production, for months.

Using Anthropic's Managed Agents platform, it works through the questions that actually decide whether an agent survives contact with real users: Where does it run when your serverless function dies in 60 seconds but the agent needs 20 minutes? How does it remember anything between runs? How do you let it read the open web without letting the open web hijack it? How do you know it didn't email a hallucinated price to a paying customer at dawn? How much did that run cost — and how do you keep a nightly schedule from bankrupting a $29/month plan? How do you run thousands of them, one per customer, sealed off from each other?

Every pattern is drawn from Moonlings, a live multi-tenant SaaS that gives each small business its own overnight AI employee. The code is that system's code, lightly distilled — including the un-glamorous parts: orphan sweeps, per-thread cost attribution, and the deterministic check that catches the hallucination the AI grader misses.

You'll learn how to:

• Run long agent sessions from a serverless app without ever blocking — the fire-and-collect lifecycle
• Give an agent memory it maintains itself, and consolidates each night
• Orchestrate a coordinator over a fleet of cheaper workers — and keep the bill sane
• Make output meet a bar with outcome grading, backed by deterministic guardrails
• Isolate thousands of tenants, defend against prompt injection, and see what every run did, spent, and got right

For software engineers and technical leads comfortable in TypeScript or Python. Not a "what is an LLM" book — it moves fast on fundamentals and spends its pages on the hard parts of running agents in production.

Build an agent you'd trust to run while you sleep.

https://www.amazon.com/Claude-Managed-Agents-Self-Operating-Orchestration-ebook/dp/B0H5TMQXPF/