You are supporting a team whose Claude Code sessions consistently load 60 or more MCP tools from many servers, exhausting context budget before the session begins.
Which adjustment most directly addresses this issue without removing capability?
Tool Search applies progressive discovery to a large tool catalog. Instead of inserting every MCP tool's complete JSON schema and description into the initial context, Claude receives limited discovery information and loads the full definitions only when a task requires them. This preserves the available context for instructions, repository content, conversation history, and tool results without removing the underlying capabilities.
Anthropic's Claude Code documentation states that Tool Search keeps MCP context usage low by deferring tool definitions until Claude needs them. Only the tools actually selected enter the working context. Claude Code MCP Tool Search
Anthropic's advanced-tool-use guidance also describes conventional multi-server configurations consuming tens of thousands of tokens before work begins, while on-demand discovery substantially reduces that overhead. Advanced Tool Use
Option B solves context pressure by destroying required functionality. Option C worsens the constraint by adding more prompt tokens. Option D expands the exact source of context bloat.
The team should also improve server and tool descriptions so discovery returns the correct tools, monitor tool-selection quality, and keep frequently required foundational tools non-deferred only when evaluations justify the additional context cost.
Study Guide references/topics: MCP scaling; Tool Search; progressive discovery; deferred schemas; context-budget management; tool-selection accuracy.
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Engineering leadership wants to roll out Claude Skills to 280 developers across 14 teams. Skills will encode internal coding standards, code-review checklists, and incident-postmortem templates. Leadership has asked how to govern Skill authorship so that Skills remain trustworthy without bottlenecking on a single central team.
Which governance model should you recommend?
Federated authorship allows each domain team to maintain the procedural knowledge it understands while preserving organization-wide trust through a central publication gate. Team authors can update coding standards, review practices, and postmortem procedures without waiting for a single platform group to write every change. Central reviewers can validate ownership, security, tool permissions, duplication, versioning, testing evidence, and compliance before publication. Per-developer or fully decentralized publication creates inconsistent and potentially unsafe Skills. Fully centralized authorship becomes a scalability bottleneck and separates content maintenance from domain expertise. Anthropic describes Skills as packages of instructions, scripts, and resources and warns that repository Skills may grant broad tool access, making formal review essential. Claude Code Skills
A revenue projection assistant has missed its monthly cost target by 38 percent. Profiling shows three contributors: a 6,000-token policy preamble repeated on every call (45 percent of cost), retrieval of historical sales chunks averaging 3,000 tokens per call (30 percent), and inference on a flagship-tier model (25 percent). Stakeholders require that projection accuracy remain unchanged.
Which two optimizations should you sequence first to reduce cost without affecting accuracy? (Select two.)
Each correct answer presents part of the solution.
The required sequence must reduce repeated computation without changing the information or model capability used to generate projections. Prompt caching the static 6,000-token policy preamble directly addresses the largest cost contributor while preserving the complete instruction set. Anthropic states that cache reads cost substantially less than uncached input tokens, making repeated, stable prompt prefixes an ideal caching target. Prompt Caching
Caching frequently reused historical-sales chunks applies the same principle to the retrieval layer. When identical, version-controlled chunks are repeatedly fetched and supplied to the model, caching their retrieval or reusable representation eliminates redundant work while maintaining the same evidence available to the projection process. The cache must use appropriate invalidation or source-version keys so updated sales data cannot be replaced by stale content.
Options A and B modify the information supplied to Claude. Fewer sales chunks could remove relevant historical evidence, while truncating policy instructions could alter constraints or projection behavior. Option D introduces a model-capability change and therefore cannot guarantee unchanged accuracy without a comparative evaluation. Those interventions may be considered later, but only after representative regression testing establishes equivalence.
Study Guide references/topics: Cost profiling; prompt caching; retrieval caching; cache invalidation; accuracy-preserving optimization; model and context trade-offs.
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You are reviewing an integration specification for security gaps.
Which two findings constitute valid security gaps in the specification? (Select two.)
Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
Credentials must never be supplied as prompt content. Prompts can be retained in traces, debugging output, caches, or logs, and model output may inadvertently expose included secrets. Credentials should instead be resolved server-side through an approved secret store or delegated authentication mechanism. Option C is also a serious gap because post-response RBAC occurs after unauthorized data has already entered model context. Authorization must be enforced before retrieval and prompt construction. Options A, D, and E describe appropriate controls: least-privilege service identities, per-user scoped OAuth, and encrypted transport. Anthropic's prompt-leak guidance recommends excluding unnecessary sensitive information, while Claude Code security relies on permission-based enforcement rather than natural-language instructions alone. Reduce prompt leak
You are selecting a pattern for a compliance Q&A assistant that must answer policy questions with citations to the authoritative internal source set. Latency, cost, and audit predictability are prioritized.
Which pattern is the best fit?
A constrained retrieval-augmented generation architecture best satisfies the grounding, citation, latency, cost, and audit requirements. The system first indexes the approved internal policy corpus. At request time, it retrieves a small set of relevant passages, supplies those passages to Claude with stable source identifiers, and requires the answer to cite the supporting material. Anthropic's search-result content blocks are specifically designed for this pattern: they allow custom RAG systems to provide source-attributed internal content and enable Claude to render citations against those results.
The retrieval boundary is critical. Only approved and version-controlled policy sources should be searchable, with document identifiers, effective dates, access controls, retrieval scores, and cited passages retained for audit reconstruction. This produces substantially more predictable evidence than unconstrained web research.
A planner-researcher-writer system introduces unnecessary model calls, orchestration complexity, cost, latency, and behavioral variance for routine policy lookup. Open-web browsing violates the authoritative-source requirement and increases prompt-injection and provenance risk. Concatenating the complete corpus into every prompt wastes tokens, increases latency, and can reduce retrieval precision as the corpus expands.
Study Guide references/topics: Search-result blocks for cited RAG; Claude citations; authoritative-corpus retrieval; source attribution; auditable context engineering.
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Aditya Iyer
8 hours agoMing Wu
30 days agoPaul Collins
1 month ago