PREPARING FOR CERTIFICATION

HANDS-ON COMPETENCIES Certification is about doing, not only knowing. A certified engineer should be able to show, with a working example, that they can do the following. Build a minimal loop with a step limit, a tool registry, and a permission gate. Add context management and prove that a restart can resume from notes. Find and fix an idempotency bug. Defend against a prompt injection and a poisoned tool description, and explain the layers. Add tracing and read a trace to find a runaway loop. Build an evaluation set with normal, edge, and adversarial cases and report a pass rate. Add retries with backoff and test them by simulating an outage. Complete a production-readiness checklist honestly. Diagnose a failing trace: in a live exercise, you are given a failing agent trace and must say whether the root cause is a reasoning problem, a tool problem, or a context-management problem, and defend your answer from the evidence in the trace. Your finished lab is the evidence for most of this list.