Loop Guards

Never trust an LLM to stop itself.

The "Time-To-Live" (TTL) Pattern

Always track a loop_count in your state.

def router(state):
    # 1. Hard Guard
    if state["loop_count"] > 10:
        return "GiveUpNode"
    
    # 2. Logic Guard
    if state["success"]:
        return "SuccessNode"
        
    # 3. Default
    return "RetryNode"

This logic is deterministic. It guarantees that the loop must terminate after 10 tries, no matter what the LLM thinks.