06·Bounded ReAct in production — max_steps, infinite loop detection, error trace as observation

Introduction

Academic ReAct assumes termination always happens via a Finish action. Production requires hard guarantees: max_steps as a hard ceiling, infinite loop detection (repeated Action-Observation pairs), error trace routing (tool errors return as Observations rather than crashing the agent), graceful degradation, and observability through structured reasoning traces. This lesson builds a production-grade bounded ReAct runner from pseudo-code to concrete architectural decisions — no LangChain, no AutoGen, only Python-like pseudo-code and a pattern library.