PREPARING FOR CERTIFICATION

REVIEWING CORE CONCEPTS Use flash cards, which are small cards with a term on one side and its meaning on the other. Cover the answer, say it aloud in your own words, and then check. Here is a starter set of definitions drawn from the book. Context rot: the loss of reliable attention as a long context grows. Context bloat: a conversation larger than it needs to be. Idempotency: doing something twice has the same effect as doing it once. Least privilege: giving a tool or person only the access the job requires and no more. Graceful degradation: reducing function while continuing to operate, instead of failing completely. Graceful failure: a single run ending cleanly with a clear reason. Prompt injection: hidden orders placed in data the agent reads. Tool poisoning: hidden orders placed in a tool description. Defense in depth: stacking several safeguards so no single one must be perfect. Span and trace: one timed piece of work, and all the spans of one task. Golden answer: the known correct result of an evaluation item. Context isolation: giving each agent only what its job requires. Exponential backoff: doubling the wait after each failed retry. The main patterns to know are the ReAct pattern, which alternates reasoning and acting; plan and execute; the Supervisor, Pipeline, Blackboard, and Swarm orchestration patterns; typed handlers and on-demand tool discovery; compaction and memory tiers. Appendix C describes each with a use-this-when guideline.