Your Agent Loops Forever: Designing an Escape Hatch Workflow for Multi-Tool Chains Without Hardcoding Limits
Someone on Reddit spent $47,000 because their AI agent got stuck in an infinite loop for 11 days. Eleven. Days. Their monitoring system apparently took a vacation, and their agent just kept calling tools, burning tokens, and racking up API bills like a particularly enthusiastic credit card fraudster. If you are building anything with AI agents and multi-tool orchestration, you will encounter the loop problem. Not "might encounter." Will. Your agent will decide that calling the same search API fourteen times with slightly different phrasing constitutes "thorough research." Your tool chain will ping-pong between two functions until your token budget weeps. Your carefully designed ReAct pattern will turn into a ReReReReReReAct pattern that never reaches the "final answer" node. The standard advice tells you to "set a max iteration limit" and call it a day. That advice works about as well as putting a band-aid on a severed limb. Sure, your agen...
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