the retry loop problem is distinct from the cost-per-token problem and most tooling conflates them.what's helped: track wall-clock time per meaningful step, not turn count. if the agent hasn't produced a file change or git diff in N minutes, it's stuck - not thinking. token count just tells you it's running; it doesn't tell you it's looping.the other piece: watchdog lives outside the agent process so a hung agent can't block its own shutdown. a hung agent shouldn't be able to veto its own termination.i built something for this actually - openhelm.ai schedules and runs claude code jobs with per-run timeouts and status checkpoints. the checkpoint pattern (agent writes state at each major step) is what gives you "where did it get stuck" not just "it failed at some point".