How to Fix Tool-Use Loops in Autonomous Coding Agents

Last month I was helping a friend debug their autonomous coding agent. It had been "working" on a task for 47 minutes, burned through roughly twelve bucks in API costs, and somehow ended up exactly where it started. The logs showed it had called read_file on the same five files 23 times. If you've built or experimented with AI coding agents, you've probably seen something like this. It's not a fun bug to debug — the agent isn't crashing, it isn't erroring, it just... never finishes. T...