REA Teams running agents on real repos
Continue, Cline, or SDK users whose tools retry after a compile or a timeout and send the same shape again. LoopGuard stops the repeat before the vendor bills it twice.
Where it helps
Wasted spend, risky calls, missing receipts.
REA helps where agents waste spend, make calls they shouldn't, or leave no audit trail.
Who it is for
Leads who cannot explain the bill
The invoice grew. The model did not get smarter. The session repeated itself.
Platform owners
You already have a model vendor. You need a cap, a timeout, and a record of what burned a loop.
Security and platform teams
Enforce deny rules before a call leaves (PreFlight) and keep a class-only audit trail of calls that use tools (TraceGuard).
Teams facing security review
Receipts without storing prompts. TraceGuard records hop status, structural hash, tool names, and egress class. No message content, no tool arguments.
Where the help is partial
For LoopGuard: when every failure is a new structure, cache does not fire. The ceiling still applies. Unique work still costs vendor tokens. Local models get the same proxy contract; they do not infer faster because of REA.
Not for
Better prose
We do not improve the vendor’s writing. Cache replays the stored stop.
One-shot chat
A single question with no code, no retry, and no policy or audit need is a thin wrap. Use the vendor directly.
A box with no model
If the machine cannot reach an OpenAI-shaped endpoint, a cache miss has nowhere to go.