When do you kill a coding agent? Stale self-reports defy time limits and tool activity
jonah_omninode · reddit · 2026-10-15
The author's real problem: coding agents run for hours and finish with a confident account of work that didn't match reality; later edits build on an increasingly stale picture, and letting the agent run longer doesn't fix it.
On OmniNode (which they work on), the team breaks work into smaller tasks, starting each worker with just that task's files and instructions, making failed attempts easier to inspect and rerun. But how long to let an attempt keep trying remains open: a time limit is blunt and can cut off useful work; tool activity is a poor signal (an agent can read files and rerun commands for a long time without getting closer). The author cares about whether it produced something new that can be checked, and asks the community what specific signal makes them stop a task rather than grant another attempt.
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