2026-07-15
Stop Building Agent Loops That Only Work When Everything Goes Right
Most agent demos assume clean inputs and responsive tools. Production assumes the opposite. Here is how to design loops that degrade gracefully instead of falling over.
← Back to BlogA demo agent loop looks great when the API responds in 200ms, the tool returns exactly the schema you expected, and the model picks the right action on the first try. Production is messier. APIs time out. Tools return partial results or error codes wrapped in 200 OK. The model picks the wrong action and needs to recover. A production-grade loop handles these cases explicitly. It wraps every tool call in a timeout and a schema validator. It treats any response that does not match the expected shape as a failure, even if the HTTP status looks fine. It has a maximum retry budget per step and a total budget for the whole loop, after which it fails loudly instead of spinning silently. The difference between a demo loop and a production loop is not the happy path. It is what happens when the happy path stops being happy.
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