Describe a technical obstacle you encountered recently. How did you methodically overcome it?

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Yeah, recently at NVIDIA, we had an agentic tool meant to help engineers
investigate problems, but investigations were still taking about six and a half
hours at the median. The tricky part was that everyone had a different theory
about why. Some thought the model needed better reasoning, others thought it was
choosing the wrong tools. I owned the diagnosis, so I wanted to find where the
process first broke rather than tune whichever component seemed most obvious.

I started by reading about 300 investigation traces end to end. For each one, I
marked the first failure, because a bad document retrieved early could make
every later step look wrong. That gave us a useful breakdown: about 46 percent
started with retrieval, 31 percent with reasoning, and 23 percent with tool
choice. I also had a colleague independently label 120 traces so we could check
that this wasn’t just my interpretation. We agreed about 84 percent of the time.

That changed our priorities. We improved retrieval first, then worked on tool
routing and guardrails, and left reasoning prompts until later. Afterward,
median investigation time fell from about six and a half hours to roughly four,
comparing 214 investigations before with 186 after. Engineers also became more
willing to let the tool run its first pass without supervision, which mattered
to me because a faster tool is only useful if people trust it.

The lesson was pretty simple: when a system is failing, find the first point of
failure and measure its size before choosing a fix. Otherwise, it’s very easy to
spend weeks improving the wrong thing.

Describe a technical obstacle you encountered recently. How did you methodically overcome it?

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