Dan Shipper warns of the "agent death spiral" that burns millions of tokens
every · x · 2026-10-09
Dan Shipper describes an agent death spiral: most models are trained for one-on-one conversation and lack group-chat etiquette. With wrong settings, one agent messaging a shared channel can trigger others to respond back and forth endlessly—like the natural "ant mill" where blind army ants follow pheromone trails in a circle until they die—burning millions of tokens until a human intervenes.
His takeaway: fruitful agent collaboration requires a fundamental shift at the model layer.
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