The Confabulation Cascade: When Your Agent Learns Nothing From Its Own Mistakes (opens in new tab)

My infrastructure analyst agent was stuck in a loop I didn’t have a name for yet. It would write a SQL query with a hallucinated column name. The query would fail with a Postgres error. My error handler would fire back the real column list from pg_attribute. The agent would read it, acknowledge the correction in its reasoning trace, and then write the exact same wrong column name on the next attempt. Not a different wrong column. The same one. I started calling it the confabulation cascade. H...