Week 7 · Agents · about 3 minutes
What you will be able to do
Cap agent steps so Helix cannot burn tokens forever on a stuck tool loop.
The idea
Every ReAct loop needs max_steps (and often a token budget). When the cap hits, stop and escalate.
Unbounded loops are a cost and safety bug, not a feature.
for step in range(1, max_steps + 1):
action = agent.next(messages)
if action.done:
return action.result
raise AgentLimitError(max_steps)If there is no cap, there is no production agent.
Key takeaways
- max_steps is mandatory.
- Escalate when the cap hits.
- Unbounded = incident.
Part of the Forward Deployed Engineer roadmap. New to the role? Start with what a Forward Deployed Engineer does.