6 Loop Types Found in Production AI Agents: A Week-Long Log Analysis

A Reddit user ran 5 production agents (support triage, strategy orchestrator, code reviewer, strategy worker, deal monitor) for a week, logging 670 events. They caught 6 high-severity loop types that often go unnoticed until the monthly OpenAI bill arrives. Here are the patterns, summarized for practical debugging.

The 6 Loop Types

• Decision oscillation: Agent flips between 2 values for the same key 6 times. Logs show a decisive answer each time, but it's alternating between the same two options.
• Retry loop: 15 consecutive calls to the same tool with identical arguments, all 15 failed. No circuit breaker stopped it. Status codes were empty, causing a silent failure.
• Ping pong loop: Two agents (strategy orchestrator and strategy worker) alternately write to the same shared memory key, each “fixing” the other's write. Got 6 writes deep before detection.
• Recall-write loop: Agent reads memory, writes a revised version that's 100% identical to the previous write. Repeats 5 cycles. Pure waste.
• Reflection loop: 3 sequential writes to the same key, each at least 84% similar to the previous one. Self-reflection turns into self-rumination.
• Tool non-determinism: 5 successful calls to the same tool with identical arguments produce different results each time. Not a loop per se, but it kills caching and triggers constant re-evaluations downstream.

The user notes that eliminating these patterns resolved about 90% of issues, but it's not perfect. They recommend adding circuit breakers, deduplication checks, and similarity thresholds to catch loops before they escalate.