About this site
CCAF Preparation is a free study guide for Anthropic's Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam (official code CCAR-F). It is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic, PBC.
Why it exists
The exam guide for CCAR-F is unusually good: it publishes the full blueprint, the domain weights, the task statements, the six scenarios, sample questions, and an explicit list of what is out of scope. What it does not do is teach any of it.
Most of the material that filled that gap when this site was started fell into two categories — paid question banks whose provenance you cannot check, and free summaries that restate the blueprint without adding anything you could not read yourself. Both share a problem: you cannot tell where a claim came from, so you cannot tell whether it is still true.
This site is built the other way round. Every substantive claim in a lesson's Deep Dive carries a link to the Anthropic page it came from and the date that page was read. If a claim has no source, it does not ship — a build-time check fails the site rather than publishing an unsourced fact.
How it is built
Structure follows the blueprint exactly. There are 30 lessons because there are 30 task statements. They are ordered and weighted the way the exam weights them, so the time you spend tracks the marks available.
Facts come from three places, in this order of authority: the official exam guide, Anthropic's product documentation, and Anthropic's engineering write-ups. Where the exam guide and the current documentation disagree — which happens, because software ships faster than certification blueprints — both are recorded and the exam guide answer is marked as the one to give in the exam. Those cases are collected in the divergence log.
Questions are written against the task statements, not recalled from the exam. The twelve sample questions published in the exam guide appear verbatim; everything else is original. Nobody here has seen the real item bank, and anyone selling you "real exam questions" is either mistaken or in breach of the exam agreement. Every option in every question carries its own explanation, because the exam is a judgement test and knowing why three answers fail is most of the skill.
Everything is checked by machine before it ships. Frontmatter completeness, section order, quiz integrity, per-option rationales, source lines on every Deep Dive section, and two injection guards run on every build. The item bank has its own style contract with a linter enforcing it.
What it costs
Nothing, and there is no plan to change that. No account, no login, no paywall, no locked lessons, no email capture, no advertising. If it saves you an evening and you want to buy the maintainer a coffee, there is a link in the footer — that is the whole business model, and it is optional in the sense that nothing is withheld if you skip it.
What it is not
It is not a guarantee. Passing depends on your experience, not on how many lessons you tick off, and the mock exam's scaled score is an approximation — Anthropic has not published its scaling function, so nobody outside the programme can reproduce it.
It is also not a substitute for building things. The exam asks which architecture you would choose under a constraint, and that judgement comes from having made the choice badly once in your own editor. The build exercises exist for that reason and skipping them is the most common way to over-prepare and under-perform.
Corrections
Found something wrong, or a source that has moved? Corrections are welcome and get applied. The site is maintained by hand against the exam guide, and a claim that has drifted is a bug like any other.