Inside the Control Loop: Why Production AI Agents Succeed or Fail

Understanding the control loop—and more importantly, its three engineering disciplines—is essential for building AI agents that work reliably in production. The order of operations (observe, decide, act, check, repeat) is what prevents hallucination and enables proper escalation paths. Without strong state, stopping, and context discipline, even well-designed agents will fail in ways that frustrate users and create safety gaps.