My new Leanpub book is live: Architect the Agent: The CCA-F Certification Guide.

It is a study guide for the Claude Certified Architect Foundations exam. More importantly, it is a field guide for the kind of architectural judgment the exam is testing.

The CCA-F exam is not asking whether you can recite definitions. It asks whether you can read a broken agent scenario and make the least wrong engineering call under pressure.

That is a very different study problem.

What the book is built around

The book follows the five exam domains, but I did not want it to read like a glossary with page numbers.

Each teaching chapter starts with a failure worth understanding. An agent loops. A tool is too vague to recover from. A subagent is given no context and invents the missing pieces. A Claude Code workflow has enough permission to be useful and enough permission to be dangerous.

Then the chapter works backwards from that failure to the architecture rule underneath it.

The repeated question is: what would you change so the system becomes more reliable, more bounded, and easier to review?

What is inside

The guide includes:

  • scenario quizzes throughout the chapters
  • two full practice exams
  • a complete answer key
  • a distractor appendix that explains why the wrong answers fail
  • flashcards and glossary material
  • original figures for the core architecture patterns
  • capstone builds for agentic architecture, Claude Code, MCP, and structured extraction
  • study calendars and an exam-day playbook

The distractor appendix matters more than it sounds. In a scenario exam, the wrong answers are not random. They are often almost right. The skill is learning which boundary they cross.

Why I wrote it this way

I have spent a lot of time around AI systems that looked good in a demo and then struggled in production. The failure was rarely “the model is not smart enough”. More often it was the loop, the permissions, the tool contract, the context handoff, the evidence trail, or the review gate.

That is also where the exam lives.

If you can reason about those things under exam pressure, you are studying for the badge and sharpening the same instincts you need in real architecture reviews.

Get Architect the Agent on Leanpub.

I have also added a dedicated page here: Architect the Agent: The CCA-F Certification Guide.