Definition
Plain language
A safety layer that notices when an AI agent is looping or getting nowhere and prompts it to rethink.
As stated in the literature
In Life-Harness, the runtime layer that monitors an agent's recent action history for repetition or stalled progress and injects recovery prompts when trajectory degeneration is detected; removing it collapses performance on loop-prone benchmarks like ALFWorld.
Why it matters: It rescues agents that get stuck repeating themselves, and without it performance collapses on tasks where such loops are common.
For example, if an agent keeps opening and closing the same door without making progress, this layer notices the loop and prompts it to try a different approach.
Heard on the show
“The second one is the Trajectory Regulation Layer, which is the GPS that notices you're driving in circles.”Episode 071 — When the Model Is Fine and the Plumbing Is Broken: Fixing Agents at the Interface