Not really sure if you mean setups like OpenClaw as well, but I ran into pretty similar issues there.

That was actually a big part of why I started building my own agent system, Arc agent, mostly just to see if I could solve some of the problems every agent faces. A few practical things helped, putting limits on iteration/retry loops so the agent can’t wander forever, being stricter about context/tool handling once external skills are in play and adding a simple cost/token counter so I could at least see where usage was going. I also tried to reduce the usage of llm whereever a simple code would work more reliably.

I tried to tackle few other problems like downtime during context compaction etc, but yeah the project is still work in progress and i am experimenting with diff stuff.