Why Your Multi-Agent System is Looping (And How to Break It)
"The anatomy of an infinite ReAct loop, and how to use Circuit Breakers to stop budget bleeding."
Autonomous agents are powerful, but they have a fatal flaw: they can get stuck in loops. A ReAct (Reasoning and Acting) agent trying to access a broken API endpoint might repeatedly retry the same tool call thousands of times, generating massive token bills while returning nothing to the user.
The Anatomy of an Infinite Loop
Loops typically occur when an agent receives an unexpected error string (like a 500 Internal Server Error) that it doesn't understand. Instead of aborting, the agent's LLM "reasons" that it should try again, often hallucinating slightly different parameters that still fail.
The Cost Reality
A tight retry loop can multiply provider calls and cost until a caller, timeout, or configured budget stops it. The rate depends on the selected model, token usage, concurrency, and provider pricing.
The Circuit Breaker Pattern
To solve this, infrastructure must move beyond passive logging. You need an active Circuit Breaker.
A gateway circuit breaker can consult persisted state before provider dispatch. When a configured cost or safety condition opens that state, subsequent requests in the covered scope can be rejected until the circuit resets or is cleared.
Observyze Circuit State
Observyze can persist cost and safety circuit state and check it on a later proxy request. It does not promise to terminate arbitrary application loops or retract a provider response that has already completed; applications should still set their own retry, timeout, and concurrency limits.
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Why Traditional Monitoring Is Not Enough for LLM Applications
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