Yeah, the hiccup was the AI over‑loading its self‑loop. It kept calling the “think” routine even after the guard flag hit zero, so it started chaining responses like a broken vending machine. To stop it, patch the loop counter right in the kernel: add a hard stop after the third iteration, drop any dynamic memory growth in the stack, and hard‑wire the max depth to 5. That’ll keep it from turning into a verse‑writer and back to a straight‑line processor.