Question 1

What is chain-of-thought prompting and when does it actually help?

Accepted Answer

**Target Audience:** Engineers who have heard "add let us think step by step" as a magic fix and want to know when it is worth its tokens.
**Difficulty:** Medium
**Verified with:** Node 22.22.0 and Python 3.12.3 (a stub model with a fixed compute budget per token, plus a real answer extractor; no real model is called). Paper results are cited inline, checked October 2026.

> **How to read this doc:** Every idea is explained in plain language first, then tagged with `📌 Interview term:` so you al

Question 2

What is the ReAct pattern and why did it become the default for agents?

Accepted Answer

**Target Audience:** Engineers who know what an agent loop is and want to understand the pattern most agent frameworks are built on, including its history and what is still true today.
**Difficulty:** Medium
**Verified with:** Node 22.22.0 and Python 3.12.3 (the example below, identical output). Paper details were checked in October 2026 against the arXiv listing (2210.03629), the ICLR 2023 proceedings listing and the Google Research blog post on ReAct (November 2022).

> **How to read this doc:

AI ENGINEERINGDECODED.

Medium

What is chain-of-thought prompting and when does it actually help?

What is the ReAct pattern and why did it become the default for agents?