Skip to content

Prompt Engineering interview questions

Zero/few-shot, Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Tree-of-Thoughts, ReAct, system prompts, structured JSON outputs, and injection defense.

What to study

  • Designing resilient system prompts and structured output schema enforcement.
  • Chain-of-Thought vs Tree-of-Thoughts prompting for complex reasoning.
  • Mitigating prompt injection and system prompt exfiltration.

Questions and answers

  1. How does ReAct (Reasoning and Acting) prompting work?

    Intermediate · 2 min read

  2. What is the difference between zero-shot and few-shot prompting?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  3. How does Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improve LLM reasoning?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  4. How do you enforce structured JSON outputs from an LLM?

    Intermediate · 2 min read

  5. How does Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT) prompting differ from Chain-of-Thought?

    Advanced · 2 min read

  6. What is a system prompt and how does it steer model behavior?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  7. What is prompt leaking and how do you prevent it?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  8. How do role prompting and persona framing affect LLM outputs?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  9. How do you design few-shot examples to prevent label bias?

    Intermediate · 2 min read

  10. How does Skeleton-of-Thought (SoT) speed up generation via parallel decoding?

    Advanced · 2 min read

  11. What is prompt priming and how does it set expectations for LLM responses?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  12. What is negative prompting and how do you instruct models what not to do?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  13. What is meta-prompting and how can an LLM generate or optimize its own prompts?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  14. How do you format multi-turn dialogue histories for chat models?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  15. What is context window truncation and how do you handle overflow gracefully?

    Beginner · 2 min read

  16. How does Directional Stimulus Prompting guide LLMs toward specific output aspects?

    Intermediate · 2 min read

  17. How does Active Prompting dynamically select the best exemplars for few-shot learning?

    Intermediate · 2 min read

  18. How does Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) optimize prompt selection using search?

    Intermediate · 2 min read

  19. How does Graph-of-Thoughts (GoT) extend Tree-of-Thoughts for arbitrary network reasoning?

    Advanced · 2 min read

  20. How do soft prompts and prompt tuning differ from discrete text prompts?

    Advanced · 2 min read

Study Prompt Engineering with progress tracking