Re:Show HN: Extra-steps.dev – AI hype mapped to CS primitives
by amabito on Thursday February 19, 2026 @06:27AM
(#47072678)
Nice reference. If agents are essentially “a while loop with an LLM call,”
then one missing category might be execution control.
In distributed systems we rarely let loops run unbounded — we add
budgets, backoff, circuit breakers, etc. With agents, it’s interesting that
most frameworks focus on observability (traces, logs) but not on hard
containment of the loop itself.
If you were extending the mapping, would “agent budget limits” fit better
as a rate limiter, a circuit breaker, or something closer to a bounded
work queue?
In distributed systems we rarely let loops run unbounded — we add budgets, backoff, circuit breakers, etc. With agents, it’s interesting that most frameworks focus on observability (traces, logs) but not on hard containment of the loop itself.
If you were extending the mapping, would “agent budget limits” fit better as a rate limiter, a circuit breaker, or something closer to a bounded work queue?