A few weeks ago I gave Claude Code a task and walked away. I came back to find it had retried the same broken command two hundred times, burning tokens the whole way. Nothing errored. Nothing told me.
AI agents don't crash like normal software. They fail silently. The output keeps flowing, your logs stay green, and you find out from the bill or a bad result.
The patterns I keep hitting:
Silent loops that never converge (the reviewer agent that's never satisfied).
Retry storms against a dead path.
