The most expensive AI agent failures are boring

Most AI coding agent failures are boring.

Not dramatic.
Not cinematic.
Just the same wrong step repeated until the bill gets weird and someone asks what happened.

That is why I think the most important control is not “use a cheaper model.”
It is “before another retry, show what changed.”

If nothing changed, stop.

That one rule kills a surprising amount of fake progress.

The other three controls I would put in early are:

1. a hard budget cap
2. one real verification gate
3. a receipt that explains why the run stopped

That is the class of problem we have been working on with MartinLoop.

Not making agents feel magical.
Making them easier to trust when the loop gets messy.