LLM Inference Interview Questions #1 - The Max-Iteration Trap

Why capping your self-correction loop quietly trades a latency crisis for a quality collapse, and how external verifiers actually cure the p99 disease.

You’re in a 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.”

Wrong approach.…