AI EngineeringInterview preparation
Intermediate·Concept·2 min read

LangGraph

Practice this question

Beginner — What are nodes, edges, and state?

  • Nodes are steps that perform work, edges choose what runs next, and state carries the information needed by those steps.
  • Nodes can be ordinary code or model calls, so the graph can be deterministic or hybrid.

Intermediate — What does a checkpointer do?

  • It saves execution progress for later continuation or recovery.
  • It is not automatically long-term user memory or a transaction coordinating all external effects.
  • Production needs durable storage and authorized thread ownership.

Senior — What makes a graph production-ready?

  • Explicit state contracts, safe concurrent updates, durable checkpoints, version migrations, authenticated resume, bounded retries/deadlines, idempotent side effects, and redacted tracing.
  • I also define how pending runs survive deployment and how uncertain external writes are reconciled.

Scenario — Resuming an approval sends an email twice. Why?

  • The interrupted node may restart, so a send before the interrupt can execute again.
  • I move sending behind validated approval into an idempotent business operation and reconcile the send key/receipt on retries.
Adapted from 13_AI.MD · “29.7 LangGraph”. Code examples are study fragments. Difficulty and core labels are editorial estimates; version-specific behavior should be checked against your project.