REST/JSON, Async I/O, Version Control & Refactoring for Claude Integrations

Claude Applications Are Ordinary Software

The blueprint is explicit that a Claude integration must be built with the same engineering discipline as any other software:

• REST APIs & JSON. The Claude API is HTTPS + JSON. Understand status codes, headers, request/response shape, idempotency, and pagination where they apply, the same as with any REST service.
• Asynchronous programming. LLM calls are I/O-bound and slow. Use async/await (Python asyncio, JS promises) and concurrency to parallelize independent calls and keep a server responsive to other work while a call is in flight. The SDKs ship async clients for exactly this.
• Version control (Git). Branching, pull requests, and history are the substrate for reviewing and, when needed, rolling back a prompt or model change -- the same mechanism used for any code change.
• SDLC integration & code review. Fit LLM features into existing CI/CD, and review both code and prompts. Prompts and model IDs are reviewable, versioned artifacts, not incidental strings.
• Refactoring. From tidying a single function to restructuring a whole service, refactoring is a core competency -- it is the backbone of codebase-modernization work that Claude Code, in particular, targets.

Why This Matters on the Exam

Questions in this area test whether you treat an LLM feature as a special case exempt from normal engineering practice, or as a normal software component that happens to call a probabilistic model. The correct posture is almost always the latter: async where I/O-bound, versioned and reviewed like any other artifact, refactored as the codebase evolves.

Common exam traps

• Assuming prompts and model IDs live outside the normal code-review and version-control process because they're "just text" or "just a string" -- they are reviewable, versioned artifacts exactly like code.
• Making LLM calls synchronously in a request path that should be async, blocking a server unnecessarily while I/O-bound calls are in flight.