schema · growing
An agent is a loop
Most of the engineering lives in the stopping condition.
An agent is a loop with a stopping condition. Most of the engineering is in the stopping condition.
Rendering diagram…
Where loops go wrong
No budgetruns until the bill notices
Silent failuretool errors swallowed, agent guesses
Tool soup40 tools, none described well
No memory of failureretries the same call forever
What to give it instead
- A hard step budget and a token budget, both surfaced to the model.
- Tool errors returned as text the model can read and act on, never hidden.
- Fewer, wider tools with honest descriptions of when not to use them.
- A scratchpad it can write to, so step N+1 can see what step N learned.