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Algorithmic Context Is the New Heuristic

Opening — Why this matters now For decades, heuristic design has been a quiet tax on optimization. Every serious deployment of A* or tree search comes with a familiar cost: domain experts handcraft rules, tune parameters, and babysit edge cases. The process is expensive, slow, and brittle. Large Language Models promised automation—but until recently, mostly delivered clever greedy tricks for toy problems. ...

February 2, 2026 · 3 min · Zelina