The Claude Certified Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F) exam does not reward recall. It gives you a requirement and asks you to pick a structure. Every item on it asks one of four design questions. Where does the work run. What can it touch. How is intent carried. What survives. Name the question and four plausible options collapse to two. The course stamps the question on every worked item, so by the end you read stems the way the exam writers built them.
There is one more edge, and it kills more distractors than anything else on this test. When a requirement says must, never, always, or cannot, every option that offers guidance is wrong. A line in an instruction file is advice. A hook that blocks the action, a permission rule, a schema the output is validated against: those are mechanisms, and only a mechanism can promise never. That rule is taught early and then used constantly.
