The AI "Doom Loop": Why your autonomous coding agent is making things worse, and how to fix it (opens in new tab)

If you’ve spent any time working with autonomous AI coding agents recently, you know the drill. You give the agent a straightforward task: "Add a user profile page and link it to the navbar." The agent says, "I've got this." It writes some code. You run it, and it throws an import error. You paste the error back. The agent apologizes, rewrites the file, and now your routing is broken. You paste that error back. Ten iterations later, your config is mysteriously deleted, the navbar is entirely ...