Hard budgets stop the bleeding; they don't fix the cause. The real fix is progress tracking plus semantic loop detection plus a planning layer that commits to a plan instead of re-deciding every step, validated on a fixed trajectory set offline before it ships.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Hard budgets stop the bleeding; they don't fix the cause. The real fix is progress tracking plus semantic loop detection plus a planning layer that commits to a plan instead of re-deciding every step, validated on a fixed trajectory set offline before it ships.
The screen is whether the candidate gives a real algorithmic change (progress/state tracking, semantic loop detection, plan-then-execute or tree search) rather than only a step cap, AND can describe offline evaluation on a fixed task set with trajectory-level metrics. The strong move is layering a cheap hard budget as a backstop under a smarter progress-based stop, plus a frozen replay/trajectory eval harness. The reserved follow-up: 'a step limit just truncates the task, how do you stop WITHOUT failing the task' and 'what do you measure offline besides final success.'
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