LLM Inference Interview Questions, issue 1, Jul 30, 2026
The Max-Iteration Trap
Senior ML Engineer interview at Anthropic, and the interviewer asks:
“Your self-correction loop improves output quality on every pass, but p99 latency just tripled in prod. Your teammate says ‘just cap the max iterations.’ Why is that a band-aid, and what’s actually broken?”
Don’t say: “We’ll set max_iterations = 3 and ship it.”
Why capping your self-correction loop quietly trades a latency crisis for a quality collapse, and how external verifiers actually cure the p99 disease.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.