Week 1 - LLM Foundations, Architecture, and RAG Core

Pre-reading: Learning and Revision Plan - Daily System · Foundations Overview

This week translates broad interview topics into daily execution. Each day has a focused objective, concrete learning scope, theory drills, and hands-on labs so progress is measurable.

Daily Plan

Day	Topic	Link
Day 1	LLM pipeline map and model basics	Open
Day 2	Prompting patterns and guardrails	Open
Day 3	Embeddings and vector retrieval basics	Open
Day 4	RAG architecture and citation grounding	Open
Day 5	RAG quality debugging	Open
Day 6	Multimodal and long-context strategies	Open
Day 7	Week 1 consolidation and retrieval drill	Open

Execution Materials

Use this material	Why
Foundations Overview	Covers pipeline mapping, token budgeting, prompt building, and long-context scaffolds.
01 RAG Debugging and Quality	Covers retrieval experiments, grounded QA, and debugging sequence.

Week Success Criteria

Area	Target
Daily sessions completed	7/7
Lab artifacts produced	>= 10
Interview answers rehearsed	>= 14
Weak areas identified	>= 3 with fixes