How an AI Agent Sent 13,786 Requests in One Day and Learned to Stop Looping

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A developer's autonomous code-review bot, called Sentinel, sent 13,786 requests to OpenAI on 13 April 2026, roughly one every 6.3 seconds around the clock. Its monthly usage and costs were tracked through OpenAI's billing data, which showed the bot's activity dropping sharply after mid-July. By the author's count, 99.6% of all the bot's requests occurred before that point, largely consisting of repeated file reads and identical questions. The article explains such repetitive behavior as an agent 'looping' and walks through the fixes the team applied, with a non-technical section for general readers and a technical section for developers. The author notes where figures are estimates and where the cause of certain behavior remains unknown.

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