Reference · Study Plan

4-Week Study Plan

Time allocation follows exam domain weighting (see Exam Blueprint) against a 5–7 hr/week budget. Check items off as you complete them — this file is yours to edit.

Week 1 — Domain 1: Agentic Architecture & Orchestration (27%)

• ☐ Lesson: the agentic loop & stop_reason
• ☐ Lesson: coordinator/subagent hub-and-spoke + the Task tool
• ☐ Lesson: hooks — programmatic enforcement vs. prompt-based guidance
• ☐ Lesson: task decomposition (prompt chaining vs. dynamic) + session management
• ☐ Practice: official guide Exercise 1 (multi-tool agent with escalation logic)

Week 2 — Domain 3 + Domain 2: Claude Code (20%) + Tool Design & MCP (18%)

• ☐ Lesson: CLAUDE.md hierarchy, @import, .claude/rules/
• ☐ Lesson: commands vs. skills (context: fork, allowed-tools, argument-hint)
• ☐ Lesson: plan mode vs. direct execution + CI/CD integration (-p, --output-format json)
• ☐ Lesson: tool description design + structured MCP error responses
• ☐ Lesson: tool distribution across agents, tool_choice, MCP server scoping
• ☐ Practice: official guide Exercise 2 (team dev workflow configuration)

Week 3 — Domain 4 + Domain 5: Prompt Engineering (20%) + Context & Reliability (15%)

• ☐ Lesson: explicit criteria + few-shot prompting
• ☐ Lesson: tool_use/JSON schema enforcement + validation-retry loops
• ☐ Lesson: Message Batches API + multi-pass/multi-instance review
• ☐ Lesson: context preservation ("lost in the middle", case-facts blocks) + escalation calibration
• ☐ Lesson: error propagation + provenance/uncertainty handling
• ☐ Practice: official guide Exercise 3 (structured extraction pipeline)

Week 4 — Integration & exam readiness

• ☐ Practice: official guide Exercise 4 (multi-agent research pipeline)
• ☐ Run all 6 scenarios in Scenario Drills as a timed mixed-domain pass
• ☐ Weak-spot review driven by learning records (re-teach anything shaky)
• ☐ Locate and complete the official practice exam (see RESOURCES.md gap note) — fall back to a full re-run of every lesson quiz + Scenario Drills timed at 120min/60Q if it can't be found
• ☐ Final pass over Exam Blueprint (incl. Appendix checklist) + Glossary
• ☐ Book/sit the real exam