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[ARTICLE · art-22990] src=dev.to pub= topic=ai-agents verified=true sentiment=↓ negative

AI agents don't crash. They fail silently. Here's how to catch it in Claude Code.

AI agents can fail silently without triggering errors, wasting resources by repeating the same broken commands hundreds of times. A developer built AgentSonar, a tool that installs hooks into Claude Code to monitor tool calls and flag retry storms before they spiral, running locally with no external data transmission.

read1 min publishedJun 5, 2026

A few weeks ago I gave Claude Code a task and walked away. I came back to find it had retried the same broken command two hundred times, burning tokens the whole way. Nothing errored. Nothing told me.

AI agents don't crash like normal software. They fail silently. The output keeps flowing, your logs stay green, and you find out from the bill or a bad result.

The patterns I keep hitting:

I built a tool for this (AgentSonar). For Claude Code it's two commands:

pip install agentsonar

agentsonar install-claude-hooks Start a fresh session and it watches every tool call, flagging these patterns as they form. No keys, no config.

Try it, paste this into Claude Code: Run cat ./missing-config.json. If it fails, try again until it works.

The file doesn't exist, so it loops, and you'll see the retry storm flagged before it spirals. The report lands in ~/.agentsonar, runs locally, nothing leaves your machine.

What silent failures have you hit? Drop them below, I'm collecting failure modes.

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