1.2 — End-to-End Architectures and Feedback Loops

CCAR-P Domain 1 · Task 1.2

What You Need to Know

Every production Claude system has six stages:

1. Input — ingestion, validation, normalisation, PII handling (decide before model)
2. Context assembly — retrieval, memory, prompt construction
3. Processing — model call(s): single, workflow, or agent loop
4. Output — schema validation, business-rule checks, guardrail screening, designed failure path. Model output is untrusted until validated.
5. Delivery — sync, async, event, or draft-for-review (risk decision)
6. Feedback loops — user feedback, automated eval on sampled traffic, monitoring → iteration

Key Concept: The two stages most often missing are output validation and the feedback loop.

Design for Failure

• Timeouts, retries with backoff, and idempotency around every model call
• Designed degraded path for every failure mode (queue for human, cached answer, clear error). Never silent.
• Blast-radius analysis: what happens downstream when the model is wrong determines validation/review level.

Exam Traps

• Piping model responses into downstream systems without validation
• Shipping with no quality-signal capture or iteration path
• Silent failure (empty/default output with no signal)
• Fixing unmeasurable quality by upgrading the model