AI agents that don’t loop forever

I build and harden tool-calling agent systems with production rules: bounded execution, safe retries, audit trails, and recovery paths. No magic prompts. Just control.

Boundaries

Budget caps, step limits, and stop rules so the agent can’t spiral into runaway cost or unsafe actions.

Telemetry

Traces and decision logs that tell you what tool failed and why the agent chose an action.

Recovery

Built-in fallback paths, retriable error categories, and runbooks so humans can step in calmly.

The problem

Most agents fail in the same boring ways: they loop, they retry unsafe actions, and they generate “explanations” instead of reliable execution. The fix isn’t more prompt tweaking — it’s control and observability.

  • Infinite loops and runaway tool retries
  • Unsafe side effects (double-clicks, duplicates, spam)
  • No traceability: “it failed” with no decision history

Outcomes

You should be able to answer: what happened, what was retried, and what was prevented — without guessing.

  • Bounded execution (budgets, timeouts, step caps)
  • Safe side effects via idempotency + dedupe
  • Debuggable traces and decision logs

How it works

Agent controller
Explicit state machine, budgets, stop rules.
Tool wrappers
Retries, error categories, idempotency keys.
Telemetry schema
Trace IDs, tool events, decisions, costs.
Runbooks
What to do when it loops, fails, or degrades.

For hands-on delivery, start with services. For reusable assets, join Axiom Ops.

Pricing (typical)

Pricing depends on how complex the tools are and how much needs to be hardened (budgets, traces, retries, and safe side effects).

Agent Reliability Audit
5–10 days
$2,500–$7,500
Hardening Sprint
2–3 weeks
$8,000–$25,000
Ops Partner
monthly
$2,000–$6,000 / month