Comment by meisnerd

Great question — and I think you're right that self-evaluation is the harder problem. Right now, Mission Control's daemon handles the mechanical side: exponential backoff retries (configurable), maxTurns and timeout limits per session to prevent runaway agents, and permanent failure after exhausting retries. But it's blunt. That said, what MC does have is the plumbing for human escalation — an inbox system where agents can post decision requests, and a decisions queue where questions get surfaced to the human. But that's not wired into the daemon's failure path yet, which is an obvious next step. I think the real answer here is some kind of evaluation step between retries — "did this attempt make meaningful progress, or am I spinning?" — probably by having the agent review its own output against acceptance criteria before deciding to retry. That's on my radar but haven't built it yet. Curious how you handle it with your STATE.md approach — do you have the agent evaluate its own progress, or do you review manually?