agentsop-bounded-loop

bounded-loop · O7

Source posture: every load-bearing claim is cited inline with a short tag resolved against references/R1-source-evidence.md and references/R2-cross-framework.md. Examples cite the real GitHub issues they're distilled from.

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1. 何时激活 (Activation Rules)

Activate this skill when any of the following is true:

• The task involves a workflow that contains a cycle — tool-call → reflect → retry, plan → act → observe → re-plan, draft → critique → revise, test → fix → re-test.
• The user is hitting a framework's "loop too deep" error: GRAPH_RECURSION_LIMIT (LangGraph), MaxIterationsExceeded (LangChain AgentExecutor), "agent exceeded max_iter" (CrewAI), max_turns reached (OpenAI Agents SDK), stop_reason="max_tokens" mid-tool-use (Anthropic).
• The user proposes "let's just raise the limit" / "set max_iter to 100" / recursion_limit=200 — this is the canonical anti-pattern this skill exists to prevent.
• The user is building a multi-agent system with delegation, handoff, or supervisor patterns — these are exposure-multipliers for unbounded loops (see [gh/crewai-330]).
• The user is building an optimiser / evaluator loop (DSPy, AutoEval, RLHF, self-refining agent) where "stop when good enough" is the termination criterion — this is never sufficient on its own.
• The user wants a test-fix loop, self-healing code agent, or iterative refinement workflow — every code-agent in production (Cursor, Aider, Devin, Claude Code) ships with an explicit step budget.

Do not activate for: single LLM calls, one-shot RAG queries, stateless tool pipelines, or flows where the cycle is provably bounded by data (e.g., "iterate once per row in this fixed list").

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2. 核心心智模型 (Core Mental Model)

Every loop body must produce a state change that proves progress — and the proof must be checkable without calling another LM.

Read that twice. It contains four claims:

1. The body must change state. A no-op iteration (same input → same output) is the definition of a stuck loop. If your body might return the same value twice, the loop is already broken; the safety net just hasn't fired yet.