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# Your Next iOS System Design Interview Won’t Ask About Image Caches. It’ll Ask About Semantic Ones.

**[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Mobile system design interviews are evolving to include LLM infrastructure topics like semantic caching, vector search, and embedding pipelines. Unlike traditional image caches that use byte equality, semantic caches use cosine similarity between embeddings — introducing new failure modes where a cache can confidently return a wrong answer. A working Swift demo (SemanticCacheKit) illustrates key design decisions: handling undefined cosine similarity via optionals, actor isolation to prevent race conditions, and the critical insight that similarity thresholds are model-relative calibration artifacts, not universal constants. Swapping an embedder without recalibrating the threshold can silently collapse hit rates or produce false hits.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://medium.com/@er.rajatlakhina/your-next-ios-system-design-interview-wont-ask-about-image-caches-it-ll-ask-about-semantic-ones-cc477c3fdfc5>

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---

Tags: [#ios](https://daily.dev/tags/ios), [#swift](https://daily.dev/tags/swift), [#vector-search](https://daily.dev/tags/vector-search), [#embeddings](https://daily.dev/tags/embeddings)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/your-next-ios-system-design-interview-won-t-ask-about-image-caches-it-ll-ask-about-semantic-ones--wff6gfzb2)

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