Most agent demos stop at the prompt. Production failures often happen after turn one, inside the loop that selects tools, evaluates progress, retries work, reacts to events, and decides when to stop.

This session compares four loop patterns: a tool-use loop that runs until a goal condition is met, a verification loop that grades and retries, an event-driven loop that resumes from external signals, and an optimization loop that improves behavior from traces. We will compare their latency, token cost, persistence needs, and characteristic failure modes. Then we will build a persistent goal-condition loop in C#/.NET, deliberately trigger a non-termination failure, and add evaluation and budget boundaries that stop it safely.

Attendees will leave able to recognize the loop hidden inside an agent product, choose a loop based on the job, implement explicit state and termination conditions, and diagnose loops that silently burn time or tokens.

Audience: Developers who understand basic prompting and tool calling and now need reliable agent control flow.
Format: 45–60-minute technical talk with a live C#/.NET build.
Demo: Persistent goal-condition loop, per-turn evaluator, deliberate non-termination failure, and budget-based termination.
Evidence: New session; no prior public delivery.
Materials: Talk-specific repository, state diagram, slides, and recording are not yet published.
Vendor scope: Framework-agnostic loop patterns with a C#/.NET implementation.