Users ask vague, underspecified questions your RAG can't answer well. How do you handle query understanding and clarification?
Real users type 'what about the new policy?' with no context. Retrieving on those four words yields noise. Here is how strong systems disambiguate before they ever reach the retriever.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Real users type 'what about the new policy?' with no context. Retrieving on those four words yields noise. Here is how strong systems disambiguate before they ever reach the retriever.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
