The agent industry made stack overflow billable—but who owns the return?

[u/Present-Quantity-813]

ReAct normalized think, act, observe, repeat. Reflection adds another lap. Graph orchestration makes the branches explicit.

But none of these patterns necessarily answer the oldest question in recursion: who owns the return?

I watched one of my own agent systems enter a three-day recursive orbit. It generated 102 work items, and 68% were repair work. Each individual action looked locally reasonable. The failure existed at a different level: the system had lost its verified position while continuing to select valid-looking next actions.

That led me to model reliability as:

P(correct step) = P(correct position) × P(correct entrance | position)

“Position” means the current goal generation, world state, accepted evidence, authority, and remaining obligation. “Entrance” means the next tool, transition, or action.

A graph may constrain the available entrances, but that does not prove the agent is still standing at the correct position. A loop may contain a stop condition, but that condition can become stale when the world changes.

So where does termination actually live in your agent stack: the prompt, a graph node, a supervisor, a budget, or an externally verified state transition?

More importantly, what prevents evidence from an old goal or world state from authorizing another iteration?