Most agent demos end after one successful prompt or tool call. Production agents keep going—and that is where the difficult failures begin.

Once an agent enters a loop, it must select tools, evaluate progress, retry failed work, react to external events, preserve state, and decide when to stop. A weak loop can repeat the same action, lose progress between turns, or silently burn time and tokens without getting closer to the goal.

This session compares four practical loop patterns: a tool-use loop that runs until a goal condition is met, a verification loop that grades and retries work, an event-driven loop that resumes from external signals, and an optimization loop that improves behavior using traces. We will compare their latency, token cost, persistence requirements, and characteristic failure modes.

Then we will build a persistent goal-condition loop in C#/.NET. We will deliberately trigger a non-termination failure, trace why the loop cannot finish, and add evaluation, retry, and budget boundaries that stop it safely.

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

Reliable agents do not keep going forever. They know when the work is done.

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.