When agents get stuck in loops (and how to stop them)

End-of-lesson check

15 questions · take it digitally for instant feedback at tendril.neural-forge.io/learn/quiz/end-builders-agentic-ai-ai-agent-loop-runaway-r11a8-teen

1. Which sentence best captures the main idea of 'When agents get stuck in loops (and how to stop them)'?

   1. Tools and goals are unnecessary for agent design
   2. Agents and chatbots are the same thing in every way
   3. Agents should always run without limits or oversight
   4. Runaway loops eat your wallet — set hard limits before you press run.

2. Which of the following is part of 'Some examples'?

   1. Disable safety checks for speed
   2. Always run with no oversight
   3. Never log what the agent did
   4. Set a max-steps limit (like 20).

3. Which of the following is part of 'Heads up'?

   1. Skip every form of evaluation
   2. Never log what the agent did
   3. Use the most expensive model regardless of fit
   4. One Twitter dev burned $500 in an afternoon on a runaway loop. Don't be them.

4. Which of the following is part of 'You did it!'?

   1. Avoid taking any actions in the world
   2. Run unbounded retries on any error
   3. Skip every form of evaluation
   4. You have guardrails — your wallet thanks you.

5. What is 'loop' in this context?

   1. A reason to skip all logging
   2. A core concept covered in When agents get stuck in loops (and how to stop them)
   3. A trick to bypass approvals
   4. A way to disable the agent's tools

6. What is 'max steps' in this context?

   1. A way to disable the agent's tools
   2. A core concept covered in When agents get stuck in loops (and how to stop them)
   3. A trick to bypass approvals
   4. A reason to skip all logging

7. Which combination most directly prevents a runaway agent loop?

   1. Longer prompts
   2. Step caps, cost caps, and detection of repeated identical tool calls
   3. Disabling logs
   4. A bigger model and more tools

8. What is the safest first place to deploy a brand new agent?

   1. A sandbox or low-stakes task with reversible actions
   2. On a public server with no auth
   3. Inside a critical billing system
   4. Production, against real customers

9. What is the best response when an agent suggests an action you do not understand?

   1. Approve it to keep things moving
   2. Ask the agent to explain the action and its expected effect before approving
   3. Run it twice to be sure
   4. Reject everything and stop using the agent

10. Which is the best way to think about an agent's 'autonomy level'?

    1. Autonomy does not affect risk
    2. It is a slider from suggestion only, to ask-then-act, to act-then-report, to fully autonomous
    3. It depends only on the model size
    4. It is binary — fully autonomous or not

11. Why are clear success criteria critical when building an agent?

    1. They are required by law
    2. Without them you cannot tell whether the agent worked or guess
    3. They reduce the number of tokens used
    4. They make the agent sound smarter

12. Why is logging every tool call an agent makes a baseline requirement?

    1. Logs make the model run faster
    2. Logs are needed to debug, audit, and explain agent behavior to users
    3. Logs are only for legal teams
    4. Logs replace the need for testing

13. What is the most reliable way to keep an autonomous agent from going off the rails on a long task?

    1. Trust the model to know when to stop
    2. Run it for as many steps as possible without checking in
    3. Set a clear goal, a step budget, and review checkpoints
    4. Disable its tools so it can only think

14. What does an 'eval' for an agent measure?

    1. The temperature setting
    2. Whether the agent reliably completes a defined task end to end
    3. The exact wording of every prompt
    4. How polite the model sounds

15. What is the difference between an agent's memory and its context window?

    1. Context lasts forever; memory is cleared every minute
    2. Context is what the model sees right now; memory persists across runs
    3. Nothing — they are the same thing
    4. Memory is faster but less accurate than context