loop-discipline

Baseline

Applies when: Building, debugging, or evaluating agent tool-calling loops, retry wrappers, state/context managers, tool-health circuit breakers, or agent benchmark suites.

Always:

• Cap per-tool retries (max_attempts = 3) and require an external-state verifier (checking file diff hash, schema version, ticket state, or DOM snapshot—never the model's self-report) to prove the world changed before granting another retry.
• Enforce a shared, workflow-scoped retry budget across nested sub-agents, crons, and step wrappers, plus jittered exponential backoff (max_calls, max_cost_usd, max_duration_sec).
• Invalidate cached context and force a fresh state re-read after every state-changing tool call (file_write, git_commit, package_install, db_migrate, browser_click).
• Probe failing tools with capped exponential backoff (min(2 ** failures, 3600)) and reset failure counts on recovery rather than permanently blacklisting a tool for the life of the process.
• Evaluate and report agent loop quality using pass@1 alongside verifier evidence traces; reserve pass@k (k > 1) strictly for research diagnostics.

Never:

• Retry a tool call up to an arbitrary loop limit based solely on the model claiming "trying again" without verifying external state progress.
• Continue executing subsequent steps of a plan against a pre-mutation context snapshot after a mutating tool call has run.
• Permanently cache a "tool is broken" verdict with no re-probe mechanism, or headline pass@100 as evidence of production reliability.

Open the full component before acting: it has the examples, the remediation steps, and the detection patterns.

Why

Uncapped retries launder one bug into seven partial writes and orphaned resources. Meanwhile, nested retry layers (cron retry × sub-agent retry × tool retry) multiply into retry storms unless governed by a single workflow-wide budget. Finally, acting on stale context after a file write or migration is the single most common cause of cascading edits in long-horizon coding and ops loops.