Issue 20, Oct 9, 2026
The Agent Loop Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Google, and the interviewer asks:
“A fixed localize → patch pipeline, with no tool loop and no verification step, beats your full coding agent on SWE-bench. Does that mean agent loops aren’t worth it?”
Don’t say: “Agents are overhyped. The simple pipeline wins, so ship it.”
Why adding feedback loops silently multiplies failure steps on complex repos and how to diagnose whether your harness, model training, or tool logic is killing performance.
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The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.