Agentic Architecture & Orchestration
Agentic Architecture & Orchestration is the single largest domain on the Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAR-F) exam, carrying **27%** of your score. That weighting is deliberate: nearly everything else in the certification assumes you can reason about how a Claude agent actually runs. Get this domain right and you have built the foundation the rest of the exam stands on. These seven lessons move from the mechanics of a single agentic loop up through multi-agent coordination. You will learn how `stop_reason` drives deterministic control flow, why the hub-and-spoke pattern is the only orchestration model the exam tests, how subagent context isolation forces explicit context passing, when to reach for programmatic enforcement instead of prompting, how PreToolUse and PostToolUse hooks inject determinism, how to decompose work without diluting the model's attention, and how to resume or fork sessions without poisoning them with stale context. Because this is the heaviest-weighted domain, invest your study time here first.
7 lessons in this domain
- 1.1
Agentic Loops
The agentic loop is the execution cycle behind every Claude agent. Master why stop_reason - not text parsing - is the only reliable signal for when to keep going or stop.
6 min read - 1.2
Orchestration Patterns
The exam tests one orchestration pattern: hub-and-spoke. Learn why all communication routes through the coordinator and why coverage gaps always trace back to its decomposition.
6 min read - 1.3
Subagent Invocation & Context
Subagents get only what the coordinator writes into their prompt. Learn the Task/Agent tool, structured metadata passing, and why parallel spawning cuts latency.
6 min read - 1.4
Workflow Enforcement & Handoff
When a single failure means financial loss or a compliance breach, prompting is not enough. Learn deterministic enforcement, prerequisite gates, and complete handoffs.
7 min read - 1.5
Agent SDK Hooks
Hooks inject deterministic behavior into a probabilistic model. Learn when to use PreToolUse to block actions and PostToolUse to normalize data - and never mix them up.
6 min read - 1.6
Task Decomposition
Match the decomposition pattern to the task, and recognize attention dilution - the structural failure where later items in a batch get shallow analysis.
6 min read - 1.7
Session State & Resumption
Resume continues, fork diverges, and a fresh start with summary injection fixes stale context. Learn which to pick when files have changed under a long-running agent.
6 min read