Issue 21, Mar 17, 2026
The Cross-File Reasoning Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Google DeepMind, and the interviewer asks:
“Your theorem-proving LLM is blind to a researcher’s custom project. You stuff the entire active file into the 128k prompt context. Local accuracy spikes, but it still fails on cross-file theorems. Why?”
Don’t say: “The context window isn’t big enough. Let’s switch to a 1M token model and dump the whole repository in, or build a standard dense vector RAG pipeline over the .lean files.”
Cross-file failures aren't a context problem, they’re a dependency graph violation caused by retrieval systems that ignore execution order.
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The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.