Module 0
What This Exam Actually Tests
Judgment, not trivia — pick the mechanism whose strength matches what the situation needs.
Judgment over trivia
Per study guideMost questions describe a short workplace situation and ask 'what's the most effective approach?' There's usually one clearly best answer and three that sound reasonable but are subtly weaker. You're not being tested on memorizing commands — you're being tested on whether you can match the right tool to the right kind of problem.
The scenario format consistently reduces to: identify what category of problem this is (a hard guarantee? a complexity question? a config-location question? a context-management question? a root-cause question?), then apply the mechanism built for that category (hook, plan mode, project vs. personal file, resume vs. fresh context, schema/description fix).
Why it matters
Once you can name which of the five decision axes a scenario is testing, the correct answer usually becomes obvious — the wrong options are the ones solving a different axis than the one actually in play.
The five recurring decision axes
Per study guideNearly every scenario in this guide turns on one of five questions: (1) Does this have to work every time, or is it just nice-to-have? (2) Is this a tiny task or a big, tangled one? (3) Where should this setting or knowledge live? (4) Should we keep the agent's memory of this conversation, or start fresh? (5) Is the real problem the tool/instructions themselves, or just that the agent needs to try harder?
(1) Guarantee vs. influence, (2) Ceremony vs. speed, (3) Config/knowledge location, (4) Preserve vs. reset context, (5) Root cause vs. symptom patch. See the dedicated axis pages and the Cheat Sheet for the decision rule attached to each.
Why it matters
These five axes are the compressed version of the whole guide — internalizing them is higher-leverage than memorizing all 58 examples individually.