LLM Agents Interview Questions, issue 12, Mar 6, 2026
The Context Pollution Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Google DeepMind, and the interviewer asks:
“You’re building an autonomous coding agent to navigate a massive monorepo and generate bug patches. But by the time the agent actually finds the right files, its patch generation quality completely tanks. How do you architect the agent loop to fix this degradation?”
Tool traces, dead-end reasoning, and irrelevant snippets silently dominate the attention budget, leaving the model with less signal when it actually needs to write the patch.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.