Bounded Loops: Pre-Run Spend Bounds, Proved Termination, and Verified Completion for Agent Harnesses
In mainstream agent frameworks, a step ends when the agent's own output says it has finished. Durable-execution platforms bound retries and time, but their checker conventionally lives in the same codebase as the work: a discipline the deployment is trusted to keep, not a property the harness enforces. We state what an agent harness must guarantee, prove it, and build the instrument that measures whether a harness delivers it. A bounded loop is a worker, an independent gate the worker cannot write to, and a declared budget; a bounded-loop graph composes them with a repair relation that lets a downstream failure re-run a finished upstream node. Three guarantees follow. It finishes: termina...
| Authors | Varun Pratap Bhardwaj, Garima Singh, Arun Pratap Bhardwaj |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 20 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 August 2026 |
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