The names that lie

Before any of the architecture, you have to survive the branding. This domain got renamed and the tooling did not follow, so the words on the page and the words in your terminal openly disagree with each other.

What things are actually called now

The managed product you deploy to is LangSmith Deployment. The runtime that serves your graph, the thing exposing the API endpoints your client hits, is the Agent Server.

Those are the two current names. Learn them in that pair, because a lot of questions in this domain are secretly asking "do you know which layer we are talking about" and the layer is named in the question.

What the tooling still calls itself

Now the fun part. The naming change did not reach the CLI, the config file, or the licensing.

• The CLI is still langgraph.
• The config file is still langgraph.json.
• The self-hosted license variable is still LANGGRAPH_CLOUD_LICENSE_KEY.

The docs site trap

The old documentation lived at langchain-ai.github.io/langgraph. It was the canonical reference for a long time, which means it is still in a lot of bookmarks bars and a lot of Stack Overflow answers.

That site now only serves a redirect. The live reference is docs.langchain.com, which is also one of the two sites you are allowed to consult during the exam, alongside smith.langchain.com.

That matters more than it sounds. This exam is semi-open-book, so your real constraint is not knowledge, it is lookup speed. Forty questions, a hundred and twenty minutes, three minutes each. If you burn ninety seconds searching a redirected site for a product name that was retired, you have spent half a question's budget on nothing.

The tell

When an answer option uses a name, ask which layer it names. Product, runtime, or tooling. Options that mix layers ("deploy your Agent Server config to LangGraph Cloud") are usually built out of exactly this confusion, and once you can see the seam, you can see the distractor.