House Robber is the tidiest choose-with-a-constraint 1D DP, and it reduces to O(1) space. Interviewers look for the take-this-or-skip recurrence and the two-variable rolling optimization.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
House Robber is the tidiest choose-with-a-constraint 1D DP, and it reduces to O(1) space. Interviewers look for the take-this-or-skip recurrence and the two-variable rolling optimization.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
