Architecture with Claude

You can call the Claude API. Can you architect a real system with it?

There's a real gap between "I sent a request to Claude and got a response" and building agentic systems that actually hold up in production ones with proper evaluation, cost-aware caching, tool orchestration, retrieval pipelines, and multi-agent coordination that doesn't fall apart under real-world conditions. Architecture with Claude is written to close that gap.This isn't a theoretical overview. It's a practitioner's guide, written by a Data Engineer & Generative AI practitioner who uses Claude Code and the Anthropic API in his own day-to-day engineering work covering the patterns that actually matter when you're building, not just experimenting.

What you will learn:

Set up, authenticate, and make production-grade requests to the Anthropic API including multi-turn conversations, streaming, and system prompt designDesign rigorous prompt evaluation workflows, with both code-based and model-based gradingApply prompt engineering techniques that measurably improve output qualityExtend Claude with custom tools, fine-grained streaming, and web searchBuild real RAG systems: text chunking strategies, embeddings, BM25 lexical search, and multi-index retrievalUse extended thinking, image and PDF analysis, citations, and code executionCut cost and latency with prompt caching strategiesBuild MCP servers and clients including the current stateless transport model, covered alongside the earlier approach it replacedConfigure and automate Claude Code: CLAUDE.md, hooks, permission modes, and headless CI/CD workflowsBuild and share reusable Claude Code skills, and delegate work to isolated subagentsArchitect multi-step agent systems using parallelization, chaining, and routing and know when a simpler workflow beats an agent entirelyAnthropic ships changes fast. Rather than pretending this book is a permanent reference, it tells you exactly which sections are most likely to go stale, model names, pricing, and fast-moving specs and points you to where to verify the current state before you rely on specifics.

Every module includes Key Takeaways, Key Terms, and Self-Check questions, so you can test your understanding as you go rather than just reading passively.

Whether you're integrating Claude into an existing data platform or building agentic applications from scratch, Architecture with Claude gives you the architectural patterns, not just the API calls to do it well.