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CCDV-F · Domain 2 of 8 · 6 lessons · about 132 min

Domain 2: Applications and Integration

Building applications on Claude: requirements, lifecycle, API mechanics, engineering basics, app design and configuration. 33.1% of CCDV-F.

This is the largest domain on CCDV-F: 33.1% of the exam, about 18 of the 53 questions. It covers everything around the model call: turning business needs into requirements, running the system over its life, calling the API correctly, the engineering basics every integration relies on, designing the application, and keeping its configuration under control.

A few terms carry the domain. The Messages API is the endpoint your code calls to talk to Claude; streaming returns the answer as it is written, and the Message Batches API processes large, non-urgent jobs asynchronously at lower cost. Prompt caching lets repeated parts of a prompt be reused cheaply. Pinning a model version means naming an exact model so behaviour does not change under you.

The recurring test: match the mechanism to the requirement. Real-time chat needs streaming; an overnight report needs a batch. A setting every developer must share belongs in version-controlled configuration, not in one person's head. The official sample question has the pattern: the right answer fits the stated constraint (cost, latency, reuse), and the distractors optimise something else.

What the exam guide tests

The official CCDV-F guide lists 6 skills for this domain. Exam questions are written against them, and so are the lessons: each row says where it is covered.

Lessons

1. 2.1 Turning business needs into functional and infrastructure requirementsHow to turn business wishes into testable functional and infrastructure requirements for a Claude app, trace them to the architecture and raise open questions.21 min
2. 2.2 The life cycle of a Claude system, from pilot to retirementHow a Claude application lives from pilot to retirement: evals as tests, prompt and model changes as releases, staged rollout, monitoring and migrations.22 min
3. 2.3 Claude API mechanics: requests, streams, caches and batchesHow a Messages API call works, and when to stream it, add images or thinking, cache a prefix, batch it, or send it through Bedrock, Vertex AI or Foundry.24 min
4. 2.4 Software engineering foundations: a Claude feature is still softwareREST contracts, validated JSON, async calls, branches, CI, code review and refactoring: the engineering that turns a Claude demo into a feature you can ship.21 min
5. 2.5 Designing Claude applications: what the model actually seesWhy one prompt behaves differently in claude.ai, Claude Code and the API, and how to design content boundaries, schemas, sessions and plugins on purpose.24 min
6. 2.6 Configuration management: pinning and versioning a Claude systemWhy a Claude app can change with no code change, and how to pin model IDs, version prompts, share CLAUDE.md and settings.json, and pin plugin dependencies.20 min

Practice question

From the CCDV-F bank, tagged to this domain. Every answer option is explained. Nothing is stored, nothing to sign up for.