Domain 1: Agentic Architecture & Orchestration
Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAR-F) › Domain 1: Agentic Architecture & Orchestration
Domain 1: Agentic Architecture & Orchestration
Domain 1 is the biggest block on the exam, and nearly all of it reduces to one question: what is actually in control? The loop is controlled by stop_reason, not by reading the assistant's text. Ordering is controlled by a prerequisite gate, not by an instruction. A subagent's scope is controlled by the tools it was given, not by what it was told. Read every Domain 1 stem for the mechanism, and you will find that the distractors are almost always the version where a person is trusting the model to cooperate.
Domain 1 at a glance
- 27% of scored items
- 7
- 66
- 48, one per published objective
What the guide measures here
- Design and implement agentic loops with proper termination conditions
- Orchestrate multi-agent systems with coordinator-subagent patterns
- Configure subagent invocation, context passing, and spawning
- Implement multi-step workflows with enforcement and handoff patterns
- Apply Agent SDK hooks for tool call interception and data normalization
- Design task decomposition strategies for complex workflows
- Manage session state, resumption, and forking
The order to learn them in
Working through Domain 1
The agentic loop
Start with the agentic loop. Everything else in the domain sits inside one, and the three termination anti-patterns are the most reliably examined facts here.