Detecting doom loops: what 582 spirals in production taught us about coding agents
Blog post from Weave
Weave’s router analyzed coding-agent activity in shadow mode over 30 days, monitoring roughly 275,000 requests across 25,500 sessions for behavioral failure patterns such as repeatedly editing the same file or continuing after consecutive tool errors. It recorded 582 spiral events and 161 broader struggle signals, indicating that such failures are uncommon but meaningful at scale. Same-file thrashing appeared across all monitored models, typically involving five to seven edits to one file, suggesting that looping is a general agent-loop failure mode rather than a weakness unique to a specific model; error streaks varied more by workload, with DeepSeek V4 Flash recording the most. Strict byte-identical tool-call loops were very rare, with only a few cases, and routing those sessions to a stronger model reportedly resolved them quickly. Meanwhile, malformed tool calls were nearly absent across more than 150,000 tool-use blocks, with the highest invalid-argument rate at 0.04%, leading the analysis to argue that agent reliability concerns have shifted from tool-call syntax toward detecting semantically unproductive behavior over time.
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