My infrastructure analyst agent was stuck in a loop I didn’t have a name for yet.
It would write a SQL query with a hallucinated column name. The query would fail with a Postgres error. My error handler would fire back the real column list from pg_attribute. The agent would read it, acknowledge the correction in its reasoning trace, and then write the exact same wrong column name on the next attempt.
Not a different wrong column. The same one.
I started calling it the confabulation cascade. Here’s what was actually happening, why it’s a tool design problem more than a model problem, and what I did about it.
The Setup
