Claude: Mastery — Building with the API & Agents

This course teaches developers to build applications and agents on the Claude API. It covers the messages format and system prompts, tool use and function calling, MCP integration, and managing cost and rate limits. Learners finish able to ship working AI features and agents on Claude.

What this course covers

The course runs across 14 topics, each one a short adaptive session rather than a recorded lecture. The tutor explains the idea, works an example, checks understanding, and adjusts the next step to the answer given.

API Authentication and Client Initialization — Set up your development environment, authenticate with the Claude API, and initialize the SDK client across different environments.
Structuring Requests with the Messages API — Master the structure of the Messages API, focusing on system, user, and assistant role configurations for complex multi-turn conversations.
Designing High-Performance System Prompts — Craft and test system prompts that define persona, guardrails, output formatting constraints, and structured scratchpads for reasoning.
Handling Multi-modal Inputs — Integrate images and document inputs into your message payloads, managing base64 encoding and optimal token usage for vision-based tasks.
Streaming Responses for Low-Latency Applications — Implement server-sent events (SSE) to stream Claude’s responses in real-time, parsing stream events and handling client-side rendering.
Defining Tools and Function Schemas — Define declarative JSON schemas for tools, specifying parameters, types, and detailed descriptions that guide Claude on when and how to call them.
Orchestrating the Tool Execution Loop — Build an orchestration loop that intercepts Claude's tool_use stop reason, executes local functions, and returns tool_result messages to resume generation.
Tool Use Error Handling and Edge Cases — Resolve common tool execution errors, handle model hallucination of parameters, and implement fallback logic when tools fail.
Introduction to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — Understand MCP architecture, standardizing how Claude connects to external data sources, enterprise systems, and local development environments.
Building and Configuring an MCP Host — Implement an MCP host application that orchestrates communication between Claude and multiple MCP servers to fetch dynamic context.
Creating Custom MCP Servers — Develop a custom MCP server exposing tools, resources, and prompts to Claude, extending agent capabilities to proprietary APIs.
Managing Rate Limits and Retries — Implement exponential backoff, jitter, and queue management to handle rate limits (TPM/RPM limits) gracefully in production environments.

Skills you build

Results are measured against named skills in the OneRange taxonomy of more than 10,000 skills, so a manager sees proficiency per skill rather than a completion tick. This course maps to Large Language Models (LLMs), API Integration, API Rate Limiting, Prompt Engineering, AI Application Development, AI Agent Development.

Large Language Models (LLMs)
API Integration
API Rate Limiting
Prompt Engineering
AI Application Development
AI Agent Development

Who it is for

Developers, AI builders. The material is pitched at expert level, and takes roughly 180 minutes at a typical pace. Because every session adapts, someone who already knows a topic moves through it quickly instead of sitting through an explanation they do not need.

It sits in the Tool: Claude track of the Vero AI Catalog, and can be assigned to one person, a team, or the whole company.

How it is delivered and assessed

Delivery is conversational and interactive, including guided lab, code lab exercises. There is no video to sit through and no slide deck to click past.

Understanding is checked with a code assessment of 5 items, with a pass mark of 70%.

Administrators can copy this course into their own library and adapt it — edit the outline, change the duration, swap the assessment format, or ground it in internal documentation so answers cite the company's own source material.

Also in this track

All Claude training courses →
Claude Cowork: Mastery — Plugins, Governance & Rollout — Lead Cowork across an organization. Learners build and share plugins, run skill libraries, evaluate connectors, set governance and approval policies, roll Cowork out function by function, monitor usage and outcomes, and handle incidents — finishing with a plugin and rollout plan for a real team.
Claude Cowork: Advanced — Designing Workflows & Automation — Turn recurring processes into reliable Cowork workflows. Learners map a process, write their own skills, design instruction systems for a team, chain multi-tool steps with checkpoints, schedule and monitor automations, and prove the time saved.
Claude Code: Advanced — An advanced course on running Claude Code as a serious engineering tool. Learners orchestrate agentic workflows with MCP, integrate with CI, and manage large refactors safely with guardrails and review gates.
Claude: Advanced — Power Workflows & Automation — This course fills the step between everyday fluency and building on the platform: running Claude at an expert level without writing code. Learners design multi-step workflows, automate recurring work with Projects, custom instructions, and connected tools, and set personal systems that compound over weeks. They finish as the person on the team others come to for Claude technique.
Claude: Core — Projects, Artifacts & Claude Code — An advanced course for using Claude on complex, repeatable, and technical work. Learners apply custom instructions, build interactive Artifacts, use Claude Code, and connect tools through MCP for long-context workflows. The outcome is the ability to run sophisticated, multi-step work in Claude.
Claude Essentials Proficiency — Measures whether someone can frame a long piece of work for Claude, give it the right source material, and judge the answer that comes back.
Claude Mastery — Complete fluency in Claude from first touch to building
Become an AI Builder — Technical foundation to build AI applications

Frequently asked questions

How long does this course take?

It runs roughly 180 minutes at a typical pace. Because every session adapts, someone who already knows a topic moves through it quickly instead of sitting through an explanation they do not need.

How is it assigned to a team?

An administrator assigns it from the Vero dashboard to one person, a team, a department or the whole company, and sees progress and results per person and per skill.

Can we customise it with our own documents and terminology?

Yes. Administrators can copy this course into their own library and adapt it — edit the outline, change the duration, swap the assessment format, or ground it in internal documentation so answers cite the company's own source material.

Course code TUL-CLA-301.