What are Tree-of-Thoughts and LATS, and when is search-based planning worth the cost?
Linear agents lock into one path and can't backtrack. Tree-of-Thoughts and LATS add search over reasoning paths. The signal is knowing what they buy, what they cost, and when a cheaper loop wins.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Linear agents lock into one path and can't backtrack. Tree-of-Thoughts and LATS add search over reasoning paths. The signal is knowing what they buy, what they cost, and when a cheaper loop wins.
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.
