LLM Engineering Mastery Checklist

As an AI Engineer. Please learn >Harness engineering, not just prompt engineering >Context engineering, not just long prompts >Prompt caching vs. semantic caching tradeoffs >KV cache management, eviction, reuse, and memory pressure at scale >Prefill vs. decode latency and why they optimize differently >Continuous batching, paged attention, and throughput optimization >Speculative decoding vs. quantization vs. distillation tradeoffs >INT8, INT4, FP8, AWQ, GPTQ, and when quantization hurts quality >Structured output failures, schema validation, repair loops, and fallback chains >Function calling reliability, tool contracts, argument validation, and idempotency >Agent guardrails, loop budgets, tool budgets, and termination conditions >Model routing, graceful fallback logic, and degraded-mode UX >RAG architecture: chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, and freshness >Retrieval evals: recall, precision, grounding, attribution, and citation quality >Evals: golden sets, regression tests, adversarial tests, LLM-as-judge, and human evals >LLM observability as a first-class discipline: traces, spans, tokens, latency, errors, and drift >Cost attribution per feature, workflow, tenant, and user journey not just per model >Safety engineering: prompt injection defense, data leakage prevention, and permission boundaries >Multi-tenant isolation, cache safety, and cross-user context contamination prevention >Fine-tuning vs. in-context learning vs. RAG vs. distillation and when each is the wrong tool >Latency, quality, cost, and reliability tradeoffs across the full inference stack >Production failure modes: hallucinated tool calls, malformed JSON, stale retrieval, runaway agents, and silent eval regressions