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A stuck loop can burn through a month's API budget before anyone notices.
What you'll have at the end
A hard ceiling on steps and on dollars spent per run, wired to stop the agent the moment either one is hit
You need
A tool-using agent loop that already picks a tool, calls it, and reads back the result on every turn, with nothing yet stopping it from doing that forever.
Not covered
Sharing one budget across every ticket a team's agent handles in a day; this caps one single run, not an account's total spend across many runs.
Write a tool-using agent loop that knows when to stop
If this loop has no repeat backstop at all yet, build that basic bound first, then come back here to add a real dollar ceiling alongside it.
One bad tool call crashes the whole agent run
If a single tool call is the flaky part rather than the whole run growing long or expensive, wrap that call with its own retries and timeout.
Shrink an agent's blast radius by scoping down its tools
If the worry is what a runaway loop could actually reach rather than what it costs, narrow the tools it can call as well as capping its spend.
Log every tool call so you can find what broke a run
Once a run can stop itself on either ceiling, log every call so you can tell afterward which one pushed it over.
Checked 15 Aug 2026
Part of the AI Agents cookbook