Guides.
Longer answers than the questions hub holds, each one written so it can be read on its own. Every figure in them comes from the sealed record, and every scope limit travels with the figure it applies to.
Start with the symptom
What the agent is doing right now, why it does it, and what stops it. Written for someone reading this with a runaway process open in another window.
- Why an agent gets stuck in a loopDiagnose an agent that retries forever: what a saturating loop looks like, how to confirm it from your logs, what it costs while you debug, and how to stop it.7 questions answered
- Why an agent burns tokensWork out where an LLM agent bill went: why cost grows faster than turns, how to read the spend, which patterns cause it, and what actually reduces it.7 questions answered
Then the mechanism
How runtime control works, what it is measured against, and where it stops. Written for someone deciding whether the approach holds before installing anything.
- Deterministic control for LLM agentsWhat deterministic control means for a language model, why the control layer belongs outside the model, how determinism is verified, and what to install today.9 questions answered
- Preventing agent loops and runaway spendWhy LLM agents loop, what a runaway loop costs across seven measured configurations, how to detect one, and where a spend cap stops being enough.10 questions answered
- Jailbreaking and prompt injectionWhy prompt injection works, what a token-free control boundary is, exactly what it does and does not protect, and how to test the boundary yourself.7 questions answered
- Auditing and testing LLM agentsWhat makes an LLM agent auditable, the five things an audit should ask for, how to replay and re-score a published record, and what to be sceptical of.8 questions answered
- A governor compared with prompt engineeringHow a deterministic governor differs from prompt engineering, which one contained a runaway loop in a pre-registered ablation, and where prompting still wins.7 questions answered
Shorter answers
If the question is smaller than a guide, the questions hub answers it in a paragraph, and the glossary defines every term this site uses. The measurements behind all of it are on the research page.