---
title: "27 Million Tokens, Zero Progress"
canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/31/practitioners-corner/article/18054/27-million-tokens-zero-progress"
publication: "TinyFish"
publisher: "TinyFish"
language: "en-US"
guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt"
issue: 31
section: "practitioners-corner"
section_name: "Practitioner's Corner"
published: 2026-05-28
word_count: 80
source_links: 0
---

# 27 Million Tokens, Zero Progress

*May 28, 2026*

[Read on the website](<https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/31/practitioners-corner/article/18054/27-million-tokens-zero-progress>)

New Year's Eve 2025. A Claude Code sub-agent entered a loop, retried the same failing command over 300 times across 4.6 hours, and burned roughly 27 million tokens. The user got the bill. GitHub issue #15909 was closed without a fix.

From the orchestrator's vantage, everything looked fine. The agent was running. Running looks like progress when you haven't built anything that measures progress.

Nobody ships a circuit breaker before the first overnight run teaches them why they needed one.

## More

- [Practitioner's Corner — Issue 31](<https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/31/practitioners-corner/markdown>)
- [Issue 31](<https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/31/markdown>)
- [Publication guide](<https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt>)