Q13 of 60 — CCA Practice Exam

Code Generation with Claude Code

Your team has deployed a Claude Code agent to automate large-scale refactoring tasks across a monorepo. To control costs, you set task_budget to 20,000 tokens for all jobs. After the deployment, engineers report that Claude is frequently refusing to start refactoring tasks entirely, or delivering incomplete results that stop partway through the first file. Logs confirm the requests are reaching the API and no stop_reason: "max_tokens" is being returned. What is the most likely root cause, and what is the correct architectural response?

A. The max_tokens value is too low relative to task_budget, causing the API to truncate responses before the agentic loop can complete. Raise max_tokens to match or exceed task_budget, since the two values must be kept in proportion to prevent early truncation.

B. The task_budget is set far below what the refactoring tasks actually require, causing Claude to scope down or refuse tasks it cannot finish within the budget. The budget should be sized against the actual token-length distribution of these tasks.

C. Because task_budget is a hard cap, Claude is being terminated mid-execution by the API whenever the budget is exhausted. Add error-handling logic to catch these truncated responses and retry the failed requests with exponential backoff.

D. The refusal behavior indicates the system prompt is conflicting with the task budget signal. Rewrite the system prompt to explicitly instruct Claude to attempt all tasks regardless of budget constraints, overriding the self-regulation behavior that is blocking execution.