Bounded Loops: Pre-Run Spend Bounds, Proved Termination, and Verified Completion for Agent Harnesses

Summary

In mainstream agent frameworks a step ends when the agent's own output says it has finished. This paper states what a harness must instead guarantee — that it finishes, does not drift, and does not overspend — and proves each one: termination in closed form under a global repair budget, no DONE without a gate verdict in an append-only hash-chained ledger, and a spend ceiling enforced inside an attempt rather than between attempts. It then builds the instrument that measures whether a harness delivers it, characterising two ways a sound-looking check passes anything: vacuity and self-attestation. Engine, catalogue and corpus are Apache-2.0.

Our summary of the paper. The full abstract is on arXiv. Preprint, not peer reviewed.

Authors

• Varun Pratap Bhardwaj
• Garima Singh
• Arun Pratap Bhardwaj

Cite this paper

@misc{bhardwaj2026boundedloops,
  title        = {Bounded Loops: Pre-Run Spend Bounds, Proved Termination, and Verified Completion for Agent Harnesses},
  author       = {Varun Pratap Bhardwaj and Garima Singh and Arun Pratap Bhardwaj},
  year         = {2026},
  eprint       = {2609.27871},
  archivePrefix= {arXiv},
  primaryClass = {cs.SE},
  url          = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27871}
}