Unbounded work will exhaust the system
Added 2026-07-14 · Last verified 2026-07-14
In 2019 a single regular expression with catastrophic backtracking consumed CPU globally and took Cloudflare offline. Lesson: any operation without an explicit bound can consume all resources. For agents: cap loop iterations, token budgets, tool-call counts, and wall-clock per task — a runaway agent loop is the same failure mode as an unbounded regex, and needs the same hard ceilings.
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Source: The Agent Loop — agent-loop.xyz. Curated in the open knowledge base (CC BY 4.0).