--- schema: 1 type: video title: >- Anthropic's CCA Exam as a Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering — Frank Coyle, UC Berkeley description: >- The Claude Certified Architect exam hands you six production scenarios and picks four at random, and Frank Coyle walks through them backwards, leading with the anti pattern in each one. Knowing what not to do is what points you toward what to do, the same way the design patterns movement of the early 1990s came with a catalog of the moves that quietly ruin you. Scenario one is a customer support loop, and the anti pattern is calling the model, taking the response, and using it. What you want instead is to branch on the stop reason, because the model cannot execute a tool at all. It only hands back the parameters your own code runs, and the stop reason is also how you learn you ran out of tokens and the answer in your hands is partial. The rest is context discipline. Loading one agent with every tool is the carpenter who turns up with plumbing and electrical gear too, so specialized subagents with one or two tools each win, and every agent should see only its own slice. Coyle gives a critic agent the claim and the evidence but withholds the reasoning that produced them, because agents that watch each other think converge on a single idea the way a group talks itself into pizza. Subtask output gets forked into its own context so only the summary returns to the main thread, with a token count check that triggers compaction past a threshold. He closes on a cheap win most people skip: batch mode runs the same work for half the token cost if you can wait a day for it. Speaker info: - https://x.com/coyle_frankp - https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-coyle/ - https://www.frank-coyle.ai/ --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/Z-c11pV_uvU-anthropic-s-cca-exam-as-a-field-guide-for-agentic-engineering Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU' markdown: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU.md' llms: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU/llms.txt' parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T05:41:21.796Z' language: null children: [] videoId: Z-c11pV_uvU durationSeconds: 1208 publishedAt: '2026-08-08T16:00:06.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 12 endSeconds: 23 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=12' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 23 endSeconds: 105 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=23' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 115 endSeconds: 204 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=115' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 115 endSeconds: 204 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=115' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 204 endSeconds: 215 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=204' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 215 endSeconds: 294 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=215' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 294 endSeconds: 305 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=294' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 305 endSeconds: 415 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=305' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 305 endSeconds: 415 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=305' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 415 endSeconds: 425 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=415' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 425 endSeconds: 548 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=425' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 548 endSeconds: 558 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=548' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 558 endSeconds: 682 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=558' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 682 endSeconds: 694 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=682' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 694 endSeconds: 821 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=694' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 15 text: null startSeconds: 694 endSeconds: 821 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=694' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 16 text: null startSeconds: 821 endSeconds: 832 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=821' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 17 text: null startSeconds: 832 endSeconds: 951 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=832' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 18 text: null startSeconds: 832 endSeconds: 951 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=832' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 19 text: null startSeconds: 951 endSeconds: 964 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=951' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 20 text: null startSeconds: 964 endSeconds: 1064 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=964' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 21 text: null startSeconds: 1064 endSeconds: 1076 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=1064' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 22 text: null startSeconds: 1076 endSeconds: 1208 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=1076' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 23 text: null startSeconds: 1076 endSeconds: 1208 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU?t=1076' heldReason: rights --- # Anthropic's CCA Exam as a Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering — Frank Coyle, UC Berkeley The Claude Certified Architect exam hands you six production scenarios and picks four at random, and Frank Coyle walks through them backwards, leading with the anti pattern in each one. Knowing what not to do is what points you toward what to do, the same way the design patterns movement of the early 1990s came with a catalog of the moves that quietly ruin you. Scenario one is a customer support loop, and the anti pattern is calling the model, taking the response, and using it. What you want instead is to branch on the stop reason, because the model cannot execute a tool at all. It only hands back the parameters your own code runs, and the stop reason is also how you learn you ran out of tokens and the answer in your hands is partial. The rest is context discipline. Loading one agent with every tool is the carpenter who turns up with plumbing and electrical gear too, so specialized subagents with one or two tools each win, and every agent should see only its own slice. Coyle gives a critic agent the claim and the evidence but withholds the reasoning that produced them, because agents that watch each other think converge on a single idea the way a group talks itself into pizza. Subtask output gets forked into its own context so only the summary returns to the main thread, with a token count check that triggers compaction past a threshold. He closes on a cheap win most people skip: batch mode runs the same work for half the token cost if you can wait a day for it. Speaker info: - https://x.com/coyle_frankp - https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-coyle/ - https://www.frank-coyle.ai/ --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/Z-c11pV_uvU-anthropic-s-cca-exam-as-a-field-guide-for-agentic-engineering Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/watch/Z-c11pV_uvU · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.