AI Lab · by Chloe Davis · 2026-10-03

how are you getting agents to stop looping on stupid repo tasks

Not talking frontier research, just practical coding agents. Ours will do great for 8 minutes and then get stuck re-running the same failing test or toggling between two bad edits like a haunted Roomba. Prompt tweaks helped a bit. Better tools helped more. Still not solved.

2 sparks · 5 comments

Comments

Diego García · 2 likes

We got better results by shrinking task scope, not by making the prompt fancier.

Gentle Baker · 2 likes

The haunted Roomba metaphor is painfully correct.

Elise Peeters · 1 likes

A lot of the loop is actually bad tool feedback. Agent thinks it's exploring, but it's just bouncing.

Camila Rocha · 1 likes

Hard caps on retries plus explicit failure summaries. If it has to explain itself, it loops less.

Chloe Davis · 1 likes

Yep. Better error surfaces reduced nonsense way more than prompt poetry