Agentic Architecture & Orchestration

CCAR-F · 81 questions

• A city 311 resident-services desk agent must keep calling MCP tools until the resident's request is fully resolved. Which stopreason should the loop treat as the signal to continue executing tools rather than ending the turn?
• A permitting chatbot calls a parcel-lookup MCP tool and receives zoning details. What must the agent do with that tool result before the next Claude turn?
• A transit rider-alert agent receives ambiguous requests that sometimes need schedule lookup, sometimes disruption status, and sometimes both. How should tool selection be designed?
• A water-utility dispute agent incorrectly ends its agentic loop as soon as assistant text appears, even when a pending tooluse block is present. What is the problem with that approach?
• A court-clerk assistant caps the agentic loop at five iterations as its primary stop rule and often leaves fee-refund checks unfinished. What should architects recognize about that design?
• A housing waitlist helper should keep working until Claude finishes assisting the resident. Which control-flow rule correctly implements that agentic loop?
• A 311 multi-issue agent looks up trash pickup, then needs a second tool for a related pothole ticket. Why must tool outputs re-enter the same conversation between iterations?
• A parks permit agent team proposes checking whether assistant text contains the word "done" to decide when the agentic loop is complete. What should the architect conclude?
• A city policy-research system uses one coordinator and several research subagents. How should inter-subagent communication be routed for observability and error handling?
• A county open-data research system spawns subagents for separate datasets. What should architects assume about each subagent's conversation context?
• A planning-staff coordinator handles both simple zoning lookups and complex multi-source synthesis. How should it choose subagents?
• A library research coordinator assigns several subagents to gather sources for a civic literacy report. What practice best minimizes duplicated source pulls?
• A housing-policy coordinator reviews synthesis output and notices coverage gaps on eviction-prevention programs. What should it do next?
• A transit-equity study agent decomposes corridor analysis into extremely narrow micro-tasks and later misses whole corridors. What risk does that illustrate?
• A public-health literature coordinator collects findings from multiple research subagents before writing for the board. What is the coordinator's primary role at that stage?
• An emergency-management after-action coordinator needs controlled information flow among damage-assessment, logistics, and communications subagents. Which communication pattern should it use?
• A municipal grants coordinator must spawn research subagents during a funding-scan workflow. What configuration is required for that invocation path?
• A permit-research subagent needs prior GIS findings to continue a parcel review. How should those findings be supplied?
• A city council briefing system configures a write-report subagent that must not call refund or payment tools. Which mechanism is appropriate?
• A school-district modernization team finished a shared baseline analysis in Claude Code and now wants to compare two refactoring approaches without losing that baseline. What should they use?
• A clerk e-filing synthesizer subagent must produce a unified summary from web-search and document-analysis specialists. What should the coordinator embed in the synthesizer prompt?
• A water-quality research pipeline must keep source URLs attributable while feeding excerpt text to a synthesis subagent. How should that information be passed?
• A transit planning coordinator needs corridor studies for three routes at once. How can it spawn that work efficiently in one model turn?
• A parks master-plan coordinator writes prompts for research subagents that may discover unexpected trail-usage patterns. How should those prompts be designed?
• A treasury refund agent must not call processrefund until getresident returns a verified resident ID. How should that prerequisite be enforced?
• A city 311 agent receives one resident message covering trash pickup, a pothole, and a billing dispute. How should the agent handle the multi-concern request?
• A housing caseworker must take over when an agent cannot finish a subsidy issue. What should the escalation packet include for a human without transcript access?
• A permitting fee-waiver path can adjust charges only after identity verification. Why is deterministic enforcement required here?
• A court-fee waiver agent must enforce prerequisite gates before filing adjustments. Which approach provides reliable enforcement when prompt guidance has non-zero failure risk?
• A utility shutoff-prevention agent escalates a hardship case to the human desk mid-process. What should the handoff list for staff?
• A public-health benefits agent must address eligibility and an address correction in one resident contact. How should those concerns be investigated?
• A solid-waste billing agent must verify the account before adjusting charges. Why is prompt text alone insufficient to enforce that order?
• A multi-MCP civic agent receives Unix timestamps from one system and ISO dates from another. How should those formats be normalized for reliable reasoning?
• A treasury agent must stop refund tool calls that exceed a policy threshold and send them to human escalation. Which mechanism provides that guarantee?
• A permitting agent must guarantee fee-cap compliance on every adjustment. Why choose hooks over prompt instructions?
• A transit fare-adjustment agent must prevent policy-violating tool calls at runtime. What should interception hooks do?
• A health-clinic agent consumes legacy EMR MCP tools that return numeric status codes. What should happen before the model reasons on those results?
• A housing subsidy agent has business rules that must never be probabilistically skipped. When should hooks be selected?
• A court payments agent pulls mixed date formats from clerk and finance MCP tools. How should cross-system formats be normalized?
• A 311 agent handles cash disbursements and sees a prompt-only rule never to refund over a threshold. Why is that insufficient?
• A city code-review bot must check each changed file locally and then assess cross-file integration. Which decomposition pattern fits best?
• A legacy permitting-system modernization keeps uncovering unknown dependencies during investigation. Which decomposition approach should the team use?
• A school-district test-coverage agent faces an open-ended codebase improvement task. How should it decompose the work?
• A water SCADA companion must review multiple services without diluting model attention. What should the architecture avoid?
• A GIS ETL remediation has stable, known steps that rarely change. When do fixed sequential pipelines beat adaptive decomposition?
• A transit mobile-app rewrite keeps revealing new constraints during investigation. What is the value of an adaptive investigation plan?
• A municipal website accessibility sweep must cover page-level issues and sitewide navigation. Which pattern should the agent follow?
• A county IT engineer paused an overnight Claude Code investigation and needs to continue the same conversation. Which approach resumes the named session?
• A city platform team finished a shared baseline analysis and wants to compare two testing strategies without losing that baseline. What should they do?
• After public-works code changes overnight, an engineer resumes a Claude Code session. What should they tell the resumed agent?
• After a county GIS schema migration leaves prior tool results stale, how should the platform team continue the investigation?
• A library digital team pauses Claude Code briefly overnight and most prior context remains valid. What should they do next morning?
• A fire-inspections refactor needs two data-model options explored from the same codebase analysis. Which session technique fits?
• Treasury MCP schemas rotated overnight during a batch-job investigation. Which continuation is most reliable?
• A housing authority casework assistant issues a request that invokes a long-running server-side tool. The response comes back with stopreason set to pauseturn and no final answer. What does this signal, and how should the caller resume?
• A parks and recreation assistant defines client-side tools for facility lookup and program registration. When the application returns tool output to the model, what must each toolresult block carry?
• A clerk-of-courts docket assistant executes a records-lookup tool that the model requested. In the Messages API, how are the results of that tool returned to the model on the next request?
• An elections office assistant produces one assistant turn containing three tooluse blocks: a precinct lookup, a ballot-status check, and a polling-place wait-time query. The application executes all three. How should the results be returned to the model?
• A water utility assistant receives an assistant turn containing two tooluse blocks: a meter-reading lookup and an outage-map query. The team decides the outage-map call is unnecessary, so they return a toolresult only for the meter reading and omit the other. The next API request fails. What is the correct explanation?
• A public-health records team delegates a records-cleanup analysis to a subagent after the parent agent has already read several schema files and run half a dozen tool calls. What context does the subagent actually receive?
• A public library delegates an audit of its summer-reading program data to a subagent. The subagent reads twelve files, runs several searches, and reasons through the discrepancies it finds. What portion of that work is visible to the parent agent afterward?
• A sanitation department launches a subagent to redesign collection routes, but the specification is ambiguous about whether holiday routes are in scope. Given that a subagent cannot ask the user a clarifying question mid-task, what is the correct design?
• A code-enforcement office launches a subagent to review a backlog of forty open violation cases. Partway through, the subagent considers splitting the backlog and launching subagents of its own. What is the sound architectural guidance?
• A fire-dispatch after-action review needs a single search across one directory of incident logs - a job that takes a few seconds and returns a handful of matches. An engineer proposes delegating it to a subagent to keep the main context clean. What is the right call?
• A county IT team is refactoring an authentication module. The work is a sequence of steps, but every step edits the same three source files and later steps depend on naming decisions made in earlier ones. How should this work be structured?
• A school district orchestrator fans out five parallel subagents, each summarizing one set of board policies. Three return usable summaries; two fail partway through with tool errors. How should the orchestrator proceed?
• A city treasury office launches eight parallel subagents, each drafting one section of a quarterly financial report. The published report must present the sections in a fixed, mandated order. What must the merge step do?
• An emergency-management office runs six parallel subagents, each producing a written assessment for one hazard category. The team must ensure that concurrent writes cannot destroy one another's output. What is the correct design?
• A GIS team plans a four-way parallel fan-out for a parcel-data modernization job. Reviewing the plan, an architect notices that step three consumes the parcel-boundary schema that step two produces. What is the correct reading of this plan?
• A procurement office must guarantee that an agent can never execute a command against the live vendor-payment system, and that the attempt is stopped before anything runs. Which hook event provides that control?
• An animal-control intake agent keeps finishing its response before a mandatory checklist - microchip scan recorded, hold period set, owner notification queued - has been completed. The team wants completion to be gated automatically. What is the right mechanism?
• A permitting department wants every agent session to begin with the current fee schedule and the list of suspended permit types already in context, without relying on the operator to paste them. Which hook event is designed for this?
• A 311 assistant must attach the current service-outage list to every resident message, and must block any message containing a full Social Security number before the model can see it. Which hook event handles both requirements?
• A transit agency instruments its agent runs with hooks and needs to record a metric each time a delegated agent completes its assigned work. Which statement correctly describes the relevant event?
• A housing authority runs a three-phase pipeline: intake review, eligibility determination, then notice drafting. Each phase is a separate agent run. What is the sound way to pass work from one phase to the next?
• A parks department agent processes 400 facility-inspection records. On the first run it fails after roughly 260 records. How should the job be designed so that re-running it is safe?
• A courts clerk's office runs an autonomous agent that reconciles case records against a docket system. During testing the agent occasionally enters a loop, repeatedly re-querying and re-checking without converging. Which control most directly bounds this behavior?
• A housing-authority workflow uses Claude Code to draft casework letters, and the team wants every file write to a case folder to be automatically checked against a redaction policy before it is considered complete. Which mechanism fits this requirement?
• An elections office runs a worker subagent that reports "all 47 precinct tallies reconciled." A downstream step then surfaces a mismatch in one precinct. What should the supervising agent have done before accepting the worker's result?
• A resident-facing 311 assistant built on Claude Code needs to let a citizen pause a multi-turn request-tracking conversation and pick it up again the next day without losing prior context, and separately lets a supervisor branch off an alternate resolution path to test without touching the citizen's live thread. Which two features respectively address these needs?
• A parks-and-recreation department wants every JSON program schedule that Claude Code writes to disk to be automatically checked for valid syntax immediately after the write completes, with the agent blocked from moving on if the file fails to parse. Which mechanism should enforce this?