AI EngineeringInterview preparation
Intermediate·Concept·2 min read

Workflows, memory, and safe operations

Practice this question
  • Deterministic: known rules and transitions. Best for permission, arithmetic, approvals, and business commits.
  • Agentic: bounded model-selected information steps. Best for language-driven variability.
  • Hybrid: AI interprets/proposes; deterministic services validate/commit.
  • Queue: isolated background jobs. Durable workflow: long-lived coordination, timers, external events, and review.
  • Idempotency: scoped key + payload hash + atomic uniqueness + durable receipt. Unknown timeout outcome → reconcile before retry.
  • Compensation: a permitted offsetting business action; it cannot erase all external effects or disclosures.
  • Memory: selected scoped continuity. Context is current input; checkpoint is execution recovery; profile is curated user data; claims DB is business truth.
  • Approval: authenticated decision tied to exact action/version/hash and expiry; revalidate before commit.
Adapted from 13_AI.MD · “Workflows, memory, and safe operations”. Code examples are study fragments. Difficulty and core labels are editorial estimates; version-specific behavior should be checked against your project.