Preparation Recommendations

1. Build an agent with the Claude Agent SDK — implement a full agent loop with tool calling, error handling, and session management. Practice subagents and explicit context passing.

2. Configure Claude Code for a real project — use CLAUDE.md hierarchy, path-specific rules in .claude/rules/, skills with context: fork and allowed-tools, and MCP server integration.

3. Design and test MCP tools — write descriptions that differentiate similar tools, return structured errors with categories and retry flags, and test against ambiguous user requests.

4. Build a data extraction pipeline — use tool_use with JSON schemas, validation/retry loops, optional/nullable fields, and batch processing via the Message Batches API.

5. Practice prompt engineering — add few-shot examples for ambiguous scenarios, explicit review criteria, and multi-pass architectures for large code reviews.

6. Study context management patterns — extract facts from verbose outputs, use scratchpad files, and delegate discovery to subagents to handle context limits.

7. Understand escalation and human-in-the-loop — when to escalate (policy gaps, explicit user request, inability to make progress) and confidence-based routing workflows.

8. Take a practice exam before the real one. It uses the same scenarios and format.