Your AI Agent Just Burned $108 in an Hour. Here's the 50-Line Fix.

Autonomous AI agents have a failure mode that every team discovers the hard way: infinite retry loops.

The agent sends a request. The model returns something the agent can't parse. The agent retries with the same prompt. Same response. Retry. Retry. Retry — hundreds of times before anyone notices.

The math is unforgiving: a single GPT-4-class agent loop at one request per second drains over $100 in an hour. Over a weekend with no one watching, that's $2,500+ before Monday morning.

If you're running LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGPT, or any custom agent framework in production, this will happen to you. The question is whether you catch it in 30 seconds or 30 hours.

Why agents loop