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Agentic Architecture & Orchestration27% of the exam

Sessions: resume, fork or start fresh

When to resume a named or saved session, when to fork it into independent branches, and when to start fresh with a structured summary instead, with the CLI and Agent SDK spellings side by side and what a resumed or forked session does and does not restore.

Official exam objective
Manage session state, resumption, and forking

~8 min read · 12 practice questions ·

What the exam expects

  • Continue an investigation across work sessions with claude --resume <name>, and resume headless or SDK runs by saved session ID.
  • Use fork_session to branch independent explorations (two refactoring or testing strategies) from one shared analysis baseline.
  • Choose between resuming (prior context mostly valid) and starting fresh with an injected structured summary (prior tool results stale, or the session lives on another machine).
  • Tell a resumed session exactly which files changed so it re-reads them instead of re-exploring everything.

Key terms: session (the saved conversation history: prompts, tool calls, tool results, responses); resume (return to a specific session by ID or name); continue (return to the most recent session in the directory); fork (a new session that starts with a copy of another's history); stale tool result (an earlier file read or query that no longer matches reality).

Key facts

What a session persists
Detail
Conversation history, not the filesystem
Source
SDK sessions (opens in a new tab)
Name a session
Detail
claude -n <name> or /rename <name>; resume with claude --resume <name>
Source
Manage sessions (opens in a new tab)
--continue
Detail
Most recent session in the directory; skips claude -p and SDK sessions
Source
CLI reference (opens in a new tab)
--fork-session
Detail
New session ID when resuming; use with --resume or --continue
Source
CLI reference (opens in a new tab)
SDK fork
Detail
resume plus fork_session=True / forkSession: true; original unchanged
Source
SDK sessions (opens in a new tab)
Multi-user apps
Detail
Resume with a tracked session_id per user, not continue
Source
SDK sessions (opens in a new tab)
Flags not restored
Detail
--mcp-config, --settings, --plugin-dir, --fallback-model, --add-dir
Source
Manage sessions (opens in a new tab)
Interrupted tool call
Detail
Not rerun; marked as cut off, Claude told to check whether it took effect
Source
Manage sessions (opens in a new tab)
Two terminals, same session, no fork
Detail
Messages interleave into one transcript
Source
Manage sessions (opens in a new tab)
Cross-host resume
Detail
Session files are local; use a session store, move the file, or pass results into a fresh prompt
Source
SDK sessions (opens in a new tab)
Sources for this section (3)

Check yourself

  • Why is a structured summary in a new session more reliable than resuming after most files have changed?
  • When should an SDK app use resume with a stored session ID instead of continue_conversation?
  • Why can't claude --continue find last night's claude -p audit?

The questions are free to read. Answers with their sources and self-grading are included with the pack.

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