LLM Inference Interview Questions, issue 9, Aug 7, 2026
The Semantic Collision Paradox
Senior AI Engineer interview at Anthropic, and the interviewer asks:
“Your agent has 40+ tools registered across five MCP servers. Accuracy is worse than when it had 8. Your team says ‘the model got confused.’ What’s actually degrading, and what do you strip versus route?”
Don’t say: “Too many tools overwhelm the context window, so I’d trim the list.”
The hidden reason your agent struggles with heavy tool usage, and why you should be routing, merging, and aggressively protecting your KV cache instead of just trimming the list.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.