Question 1

What belongs in the system prompt versus the user message?

Accepted Answer

**Target Audience:** Engineers wiring their first chat-API feature who are unsure which text belongs in which role.
**Difficulty:** Easy
**Verified with:** Node 22.22.0 and Python 3.12.3 (a request builder with a simulated byte-exact prefix cache; no real model is called). Provider API facts are cited inline from their docs or forum posts, checked October 2026.

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

Question 2

What is the difference between zero-shot, one-shot and few-shot prompting?

Accepted Answer

**Target Audience:** Beginners writing their first production prompts, and anyone who needs to explain in-context learning precisely in an interview.
**Difficulty:** Easy
**Verified with:** Node 22.22.0 and Python 3.12.3 (a ticket-classifier harness with a deterministic stub model; 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 also learn the

Question 3

What is context engineering and how does it differ from prompt engineering?

Accepted Answer

**Target Audience:** Engineers moving from single prompts to RAG systems and agents, who need to explain what changes when "the prompt" becomes a pipeline.
**Difficulty:** Medium
**Verified with:** Node 22.22.0 and Python 3.12.3 (a context assembler run over simulated candidate items with given token counts; no real model is called). Origins of the term and published guidance are cited inline, checked October 2026.

> **How to read this doc:** Every idea is explained in plain language first, the

Question 4

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

AI ENGINEERINGDECODED.

Easy

What belongs in the system prompt versus the user message?

What is the difference between zero-shot, one-shot and few-shot prompting?

Medium

What is context engineering and how does it differ from prompt engineering?

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