architecture

A clean fundamentals question that catches people who only know GPT. The signal is matching the architecture to the task by its attention pattern, and explaining why the field consolidated on decoder-only even for non-generation tasks. Here is that answer.

Frameworks promise speed and deliver abstraction you'll eventually fight. Rolling your own is more code but full control. Here is the honest tradeoff, and why many production teams end up thinner than they started.

The industry conflates 'agent' with anything that calls an LLM. The useful distinction is how much control you hand to the model, and more autonomy is not better. Here is the spectrum and the decision rule.

A hardware-literacy question, especially at NVIDIA and the labs. The signal is understanding throughput vs latency hardware, the memory hierarchy, and why matrix multiplication maps onto GPUs and TPUs. Here is the architecture-aware answer.