Your agent's idle timer talks to the prompt cache, and most loops are written as if it does not. The five-minute nap is the worst number on the board. Here is why, and the timing habit that fixed mine.
I shipped an agent that wakes every few minutes to check on a long-running job.
It worked on the first try. My bill did not make sense.
Loop logic, correct. Model choice, fine. Cost was hiding somewhere I never thought to look, in the gap between two turns. In the sleep.
Here is the part nobody prints on the box. Your agent's idle timer talks to the prompt cache, and most loops are written as if it does not.
Your sleep talks to the cache
Where idle time hides inside agent harnesses, why it dominates your bill, and how durable execution drops idle cost to zero.
I deployed a change, and the agent needed to confirm the new version was live before running a smoke...
A while-true loop buys persistence, not correctness. A wrong turn, looped, is just a faster way to be wrong — put the skeptic…
Alright, I run my agents in YOLO mode. And instead of waking up braced for a disaster, I sleep...
You don't need a better agent. You need a better debug loop. I've been building agentic systems long...
Why your AI agent gets stuck calling the same tool 47 times in a row, and three concrete patterns to break the loop in production.
