Systemic Risk
Retry Inflation
The exponential growth of prompts and token consumption required to correct an agent that has lost context or deviated from architectural intent.
Operational Symptoms
- • 15+ prompts for simple features
- • Massive token context drops
- • Developer exhaustion
Economic Impact
Wasted API usage & compute resources.
Governance Collapse
Signals a complete lack of runtime gating.
How Engineering Teams Describe This
"The retry loops never stop."
"Claude keeps retrying broken fixes."
"Infinite patch loops."
Diagnostic Telemetry
Retry spikesRecursive patch chainsToken burn explosion
Operational FAQ
How do you stop recursive retry loops?
Implement a Retry Burn Engine that limits recursive executions and halts the agent when thresholds are met.
Why are AI coding agents burning tokens?
Retry inflation causes token usage to expand exponentially as the context window fills with failed attempts.