# Our AI reviewer invented a request. Our producer retried 245 times. > Source: > Published: 2026-08-24 00:31:03+00:00 We run ~100 LLM agents unattended on local models. Last week we found one document that had been rewritten **245 times in 5 days** — every attempt rejected. A sibling document: 225 times. Combined, about 470 wasted generations, all burned on the same two files. Here is the autopsy, with the actual numbers. Our pipeline is simple: a producer agent writes a document, a reviewer agent checks it against a contract (minimum length, required sections, no placeholder junk), and rejected work goes back with fix instructions. The rejected document was a key-management (KMS) implementation spec — 4,452 characters, perfectly on-topic. The reviewer's verdict: "The request was a 3-line email triage response (LOCK / VERDICT / REASON), but the answer is a long KMS spec. Rewrite as3 lines only." One problem. We grepped the document: the words "LOCK", "VERDICT", and the name of the triage service **appear zero times** in it. The reviewer had invented the request. Two contracts collided: No output can satisfy both. So the producer failed the contract, got re-queued, produced again, failed again — 245 times. Our retry cap counted **reviews**, but a contract-failed output never reaches review. The give-up mechanism existed; it just watched the wrong counter. Our review prompt contained the artifact body (first 4,000 chars) and the output format. **It never contained the original request.** We asked a model "does this match the request?" without telling it what the request was. A model asked to judge against information it doesn't have will hallucinate that information. Ours did, confidently, 245 times' worth. Bonus failure: we truncated long documents to 4,000 characters before review without saying so, and reviewers marked them "thin — cut off mid-sentence." The cut was ours, not the producer's. We audited all 2,038 reviews on file for concrete terms (product names, format tokens) that appear in the review but **nowhere in the reviewed document**. Result: That's the uncomfortable lesson: a 0.2% hallucination rate produced 470 wasted runs, because nothing ever gave up. Low rate × infinite retries = unbounded damage. The rate is not the risk; the loop is. Each fix ships with a test we deliberately broke to confirm it fails. The checker that catches broken outputs in this story (empty text, language leakage, placeholder junk, contract violations) is free on npm: [honto-contract](https://www.npmjs.com/package/honto-contract) — it passed 600 downloads last week, so somebody besides us finds this useful now. The unattended-operation checklist and three of our watchdog templates are free (email-gated): [Unattended-Operation Kit](https://gxcafe.co.jp/harness-kit/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=harness-kit) The full set of 7 production templates (cron registry, silent-zero watch, heartbeat, output contracts — the exact ones in this story) is [US$59](https://gxcafe.co.jp/harness-kit/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=templates-pro). Honest note: we have no customers yet. Everything above is exactly what we run on ourselves, measured on our own failures.