Anthropic - Claude Certified Developer - Foundations Study Guide

1: Agents and Workflows

This chapter establishes the architectural vocabulary you will use for the rest of the course: the difference between a predefined workflow and a self-directing agent, when each one earns its added latency and cost, and how to build both on Claude using the Messages API, a custom loop, the Claude Agent SDK, or Anthropic-hosted Managed Agents. It covers manager and supervisor hierarchies, the role of subagents in isolating context, the core tool-use loop, deterministic enforcement through hooks, and the agentic abstraction frameworks you will meet in production code.