---
title: "Anthropic's CCA Exam as a Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-07-01"
time: "11:10am-11:30am"
track: "Agentic Engineering"
room: "Track 8"
speakers: ["Frank Coyle"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "Agentic Engineering"
scheduleRoom: "Track 8"
scheduleLabels: ["Agentic Engineering", "Track 8", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# Anthropic's CCA Exam as a Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 11:10am-11:30am
- Track/room: Agentic Engineering · Track 8
- Speaker(s): Frank Coyle
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: Agentic Engineering
- Room: Track 8
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
**Anthropic's CCA Exam: A Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering** The Claude Certified Architect (CCA) exam distills what Anthropic has learned from working with the AI companies shipping agents to production — the patterns that work, the anti-patterns that quietly burn tokens and trust, and the architectural decisions that separate demos from systems you'd stake a quarter on. This talk treats the exam as a field guide for agentic engineering, whether or not you ever sit for it. We'll walk through the five competency domains the exam tests — Agentic Architecture, Tool Design and MCP Integration, Claude Code, Prompt Engineering, and Context Management — with particular emphasis on multi-agent orchestration, subagent delegation, tool schema design, and lifecycle hooks. We'll then work through the six real-world scenarios the exam uses to probe judgment, each organized around an anti-pattern: the seductive-but-wrong move that looks reasonable until it costs you a production incident. Attendees leave with a working mental model of the agentic surface area and a checklist of the failure modes that matter most when moving from prototype to production. **Who should attend:** engineers and architects building agentic systems with Claude or other frontier models, technical leads evaluating agent designs, and developers considering the CCA credential.

## Media Evidence
No related AI Engineer channel video found yet.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
No official session recording transcript was found by exact title match on the AI Engineer YouTube channel during this run.

## People
- [[frank-coyle]]

## Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# Anthropic's CCA Exam as a Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 11:10am-11:30am - Track/room: Agentic Engineering · Track 8 - Speaker(s): Frank Coyle - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: Agentic Engineering - Room: Track 8 - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description **Anthropic's CCA Exam: A Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering** The Claude Certified Architect (CCA) exam distills what Anthropic has learned from working with the AI companies shipping agents to production — the patterns that work, the anti-patterns that quietly burn tokens and trust, and the architectural decisions that separate demos from systems you'd stake a quarter on. This talk treats the exam as a field guide for agentic engineering, whether or not you ever sit for it. We'll walk through the five competency domains the exam tests — Agentic Architecture, Tool Design and MCP Integration, Claude Code, Prompt Engineering, and Context Management — with particular emphasis on multi-agent orchestration, subagent delegation, tool schema design, and lifecycle hooks. We'll then work through the six real-world scenarios the exam uses to probe judgment, each organized around an anti-pattern: the seductive-but-wrong move that looks reasonable until it costs you a production incident.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[frank-coyle|Frank Coyle]] — Lecturer, UCALBerkeley / Founder AI/Edge at [[ucal-berkeley|UCAL Berkeley]].

### Topics Covered
- [[agent-security]]
- [[coding-agents]]
- [[mcp]]

### Derived Links And Source Material

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.