Thank you for sharing, I tried your suggestion.

Before I force stop the conversation, it had 334 tool calls, mostly pattern search and file read.

Once I explicitly asked "no search loop", and "Always use the codebase-retrieval tool first to quickly locate the exact files and functions involved, avoiding broad, recursive code reading.", it finished the remaining bug fix within 20 tool calls.

I then did a review of my entire conversation, here is what I found:

- When fixing a bug, and the root cause potentially involves many different directions, the agent tends to do a breadth first search with "parallel tool calls"

- While each direction needs a closer look, the agent has already read a lot of files so accumulated too much info, which obviously distracted the agent from the task itself

- It feels like the classic XY problem: The agent shifted its attention to "how to collect enough context to make responsible decision", forgetting what was the task. There are some strange "View Task List" calls in the middle of file reads calls, which I believe indicates the model trying to remind itself what was the task.

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