What state should persist between agent turns?

Instruction: Describe the minimum state that should survive across multiple agent steps.

Context: Checks whether the candidate can explain the core concept clearly and connect it to real production decisions. Describe the minimum state that should survive across multiple agent steps.

Updated

Example Answer

The way I'd think about it is this: Only the state that is needed to continue the job reliably should persist. That usually includes user intent, confirmed constraints, completed actions, pending approvals, important tool outputs, and identifiers needed to resume safely.

I do not want the agent carrying forward every conversational detail just because it might be useful. Excess state makes prompts noisy and increases the chance of stale or irrelevant context steering the next turn.

I also separate durable workflow state from ephemeral reasoning. The durable state should be explicit, inspectable, and safe to reload after interruption. The model’s scratchpad should not become the system of record.

What matters in an interview is not only knowing the definition, but being able to connect it back to how it changes modeling, evaluation, or deployment decisions in practice.

Common Poor Answer

A weak answer is saying you should persist as much context as possible so the agent stays smart. More state often makes agents less reliable, not more.

Your preparation path

Work through these questions in order. Read the answer aloud, then explain it in your own words.

1. Start with the foundations

Build the vocabulary and explain the core decisions.

  1. When would you use a deterministic workflow instead of an agent? Free sample
  2. What state should persist between agent turns? Free sample
  3. How do you decide whether an agent should ask a human for approval? Free sample

2. Apply it to a real workflow

Practice diagnosis, validation, and everyday tradeoffs.

  1. How would you keep an agent from looping on the same failed action? Free sample
  2. When do multi-agent systems create more risk than value? Member answer
  3. An agent keeps choosing the wrong skill. How would you diagnose and fix its catalog? Member answer

3. Prepare for senior discussions

Explain failure boundaries, recovery, and production choices.

  1. Design an agent that can resume after partial failure without repeating side effects. Member answer
  2. After a model upgrade, how would you decide which agent-harness rules to remove? Member answer
  3. An agent's execution container dies halfway through a task. What survives, and how does it recover? Member answer

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