Practice

You send Claude a question, get an answer, then send a follow-up that says 'expand on your second point.' For the model to know what 'your second point' refers to, what must be true of your second API request?

In a Messages API response, what does stop_reason = "tool_use" tell you?

When Claude 'uses a tool' to look up an order, who actually executes the lookup against your database?

Your app has two tools, lookup_customer and lookup_order, both described only as 'Retrieves data.' The model keeps calling the wrong one. Based on how tool selection works, what's the root cause?

In the simplest terms, what makes a system an 'agentic loop'?

A coordinator agent delegates part of a research task to a subagent. The subagent produces a weak result, seemingly unaware of facts the coordinator already gathered. What's the most likely cause?

What is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), most precisely?

In a Claude Code project, what role does the CLAUDE.md file play?

Your YesChef support agent loop occasionally never returns to the user — it keeps calling tools in circles when a chef's availability tool returns ambiguous data. A teammate proposes capping the loop at 5 iterations and returning whatever text the model last produced. Why is this the wrong primary fix?

In a single response, Claude returns two tool_use blocks: lookup_order and get_customer. What must your loop do before the next API call?

You run your research system on 'caring for columnar cacti in cold climates.' Every subagent succeeds, yet the final report covers only watering and ignores cold-hardiness, soil, and light. The coordinator log shows it decomposed the topic into 'watering frequency,' 'watering amount,' and 'overwatering signs.' What is the most likely root cause?

Your coordinator delegates to a synthesis subagent, but the synthesis output keeps inventing which source a statistic came from. The search subagent definitely found correct, attributed data. What is the most direct fix?

Production data shows your YesChef agent skips get_customer in 12% of cases and issues refunds against a customer's stated name, sometimes refunding the wrong account. Which change most effectively fixes this?

Your booking tools return dates inconsistently: get_yeschef_booking gives a Unix epoch, lookup_chef_availability gives ISO 8601, and a legacy tool returns a numeric status code. The agent keeps miscomparing dates. Which hook and why?

A PR touches 14 files in your Music League data pipeline. Your single-pass review gives deep feedback on some files, shallow on others, misses obvious bugs, and even flags a pattern in one file while approving identical code in another. Best restructuring?

You analyzed the YesChef codebase in a session yesterday, then refactored three files. Today you want the agent to continue, but its prior tool results now describe code that no longer exists. Best approach?