Doom-loop detection in autonomous agents: Fingerprint and sliding window
Prudent-Amphibian453 · reddit · 2026-07-20
Autonomous agents often get stuck in doom-loops, repeatedly calling the same tool and burning API budgets. A developer shared their detection approach:
- Fingerprinting: Hashing the tool name and arguments to create a unique identifier for identical calls.
- Sliding Window: Keeping a FIFO log of the last 20 fingerprints.
- Cycle Detection: Identifying repeating cycles of length 1 to 3 that occur at least 3 times.
- Escalation: Injecting a gentle nudge on the first detection, a stronger warning on the second, and halting the turn on the third.
The author notes this only catches byte-identical structural loops, missing semantic no-progress loops where args vary slightly. They are looking for community insights on smarter techniques, such as using embeddings for similarity or an LLM-judge to evaluate actual progress.
Related event: Catching Agent Infinite Loops: Fingerprint & Sliding Window(6 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Agent Field Kit launches $29 security runbooks for production AI agents — alvelda · 2026-10-27
- Dev mixes Claude specs with abliterated GLM to build SS7 threat detector — l4rz · 2026-10-27
- Cloudflare Durable Objects validated as top architecture for AI agent WebSocket servers — tristanbob · 2026-10-27
- GitHub Next's Chopin prototype explores real-time multiplayer agentic planning — max__drake · 2026-10-27
- Veynod: An Open-Source Shared Workspace Where AI Agents Collaborate Like a Team — TKOWNS · 2026-10-27
- TMLR paper: enforced thinking doesn't reliably make LLM agents disclose key info to users — SharonYixuanLi · 2026-10-27