LLM Inference Interview Questions, issue 24, Aug 24, 2026
The Reliability Collapse Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Anthropic, and the interviewer asks:
“Your agent completes 59-minute tasks at 50% success. Leadership wants to ship it autonomously. What’s your deployment boundary?”
Don’t say: “We’ll add retries and monitoring, then ship it.”
Why quoting maximum agent task durations reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of system design, and the exact checkpointing architecture required to survive the 80% reliability curve.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.