AI agents are fundamentally different from traditional software. In a standard application, code executes deterministically. If there is an error, it throws an exception and halts.
Autonomous agent frameworks like CrewAI and LangChain operate on a non-deterministic loop. The agent evaluates a goal, picks a tool, looks at the output, and decides what to do next.
This introduces a massive engineering vulnerability: the recursive tool-use loop.
The Anatomy of an Agent Crash Loop
Consider a researcher agent told to find data on a niche market using a custom search tool.
