Agent Walking-Dead State Detection: How to Detect and Patch Stalled AI Agents
A “walking-dead” AI agent is a process that keeps running, consuming tokens and passing every liveness check, while producing no durable progress toward its task. You detect it not by watching whether the process is alive, but by tracking whether its work actually advances. In one documented case, a SWE-bench Verified agent stayed busy until it used 1.06 million tokens—inspecting, reasoning, and calling tools—yet never wrote the patch, and every health check reported it healthy. This guide shows you how to detect walking-dead states, separate liveness from progress, and patch stalled agents before they burn your budget. ...
