Implement top-k and top-p (nucleus) sampling from a model's next-token logits.
Every chat model's 'temperature' and 'top_p' knobs come down to a few lines of logit surgery. Implementing them proves you understand decoding rather than just calling it. Here is the from-scratch version.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Every chat model's 'temperature' and 'top_p' knobs come down to a few lines of logit surgery. Implementing them proves you understand decoding rather than just calling it. Here is the from-scratch version.
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.
