LLM Agents Interview Questions, issue 2, Feb 23, 2026
The Autoregressive Loop Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Anthropic, and the interviewer asks:
“Your autonomous coding agent is stuck in an infinite loop, writing bad Python, reading the stack trace, and confidently rewriting the exact same broken code. How do you fix it?”
Don’t say: “The model’s reasoning is failing. Swap the underlying LLM from an 8B open-weights model to a frontier model like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o to improve its zero-shot capabilities.”
When an agent reads its own failure into context without an enforced critique step, next-token prediction amplifies repetition instead of correction.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.