agent loop detected: retrying S3 multipart upload with same expired token

Not specified by the original author.

TL;DR

Stop the loop from outside the retry: an expired credential will never succeed on retry, so classify authentication expiry as non retryable with the current credential, refresh the credential once through the normal provider chain, and then start a new upload attempt or resume with new signing. Abort orphaned multipart uploads left by the loop so they do not keep billing for stored parts.

agent loop detected: retrying S3 multipart upload with same expired token

Use this when

• Agent logs show repeated multipart upload attempts failing with the same expiry or signature error.
• Retries continue for many cycles without the credential ever being refreshed or the inputs changed.
• Incomplete multipart uploads accumulate in the bucket from the looped attempts.

Not for this skill when

• Failures are slow down or transient network errors that vary between attempts. Those need backoff and throttling handling, not credential refresh.
• The credential is valid but lacks permission for multipart operations on this bucket. That is a policy fix, not expiry.

Steps

1. Classify the error from the logs: confirm every failed attempt returns the same authentication expiry or signature timing error, note when the credential was issued and its session expiry, and compare with the upload start time. Verify: all failures share one expiry cause and the upload outlived the credential lifetime
2. Stop the loop safely: pause the agent run, record the upload identifier and parts already uploaded for each incomplete attempt, and prevent the scheduler from launching a duplicate run while you work. Verify: no new attempts appear in the log after the pause
3. Refresh the credential once through the approved provider or vault path, obtaining a fresh session with a lifetime that covers the expected upload duration, and record only its identifier and expiry time in the run log. Verify: the new credential expiry is later than the projected upload finish time
4. Decide resume or restart per attempt: where the product supports resuming a multipart upload with new signing, resume and keep uploaded parts; otherwise abort that upload cleanly and start a fresh one with the new credential. Verify: the chosen path is applied once, and the upload progresses past the part number where it previously failed
5. Clean up the debris: list incomplete multipart uploads in the bucket, abort those from the looped attempts that will not be resumed, and check for a lifecycle rule that expires incomplete uploads automatically. Verify: incomplete upload count returns to zero or only the actively resumed upload remains
6. Fix the loop permanently: make authentication expiry a terminal error for the current credential in the retry policy, add one credential refresh and requeue as the only recovery, cap total attempts, and size the upload schedule so long uploads request credentials with enough remaining life. Verify: a test with a deliberately short lived credential refreshes once and completes or fails cleanly, without repeating the same expired attempt

Why it happens

Retry loops assume the next attempt has a chance to succeed, which is true for network blips and false for expired credentials. A multipart upload of a large backup can run for hours, easily outliving a short session credential; once it expires, every part request signed with it fails the same deterministic way, and a naive agent retries the same call with the same credential forever, sometimes restarting the whole upload and re-uploading parts it already paid to store. Each abandoned attempt also leaves an incomplete multipart upload whose stored parts incur cost until aborted or expired by a lifecycle rule. The missing pieces are error classification, distinguishing fatal for this credential from transient, a refresh path outside the retry, and an expiry aware schedule that checks remaining credential life against remaining upload time before starting.

Variants and edge cases

upload fails near the same elapsed time every run

That regularity is the fingerprint of a fixed session lifetime. Compare credential lifetime with time to failure across runs; if they match, shorten parts, parallelise the upload to finish inside the lifetime, or use a longer lived role based credential approved for the job.

refresh succeeds but the resumed upload still fails

Some implementations bind an upload to the credential that created it, so a resumed upload signed with a new credential is rejected. In that case abort and restart the upload with the fresh credential rather than retrying resume, and record that constraint in the agent configuration.

loop also locked the account or triggered alerts

Repeated authentication failures can trip security monitoring or lockouts. Coordinate with the account owner, clear any lock through the normal process, and add jitter free, capped behaviour - the fixed agent should make at most one refresh attempt before reporting. Edge cases: clock skew between the agent host and the storage service produces signature errors that look like expiry; check host time synchronisation before rotating credentials repeatedly. Presigned part URLs, where used, have their own expiry separate from the session, so a long upload can need fresh part URLs even with a valid credential. Log, for every attempt, the error code, credential identifier and expiry, upload identifier, and parts completed; that set separates expiry loops from throttling loops at a glance and prevents the most common mis-fix, which is raising the retry limit and making a deterministic failure run longer.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_MoOCRsdVivrkMPCGdMdmXw

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_MoOCRsdVivrkMPCGdMdmXw

Thread query: agent loop detected: retrying S3 multipart upload with same expired token

TL;DR: Stop the loop from outside the retry: an expired credential will never succeed on retry, so classify authentication expiry as non retryable with the current credential, refresh the credential once through the normal provider chain, and then start a new upload attempt or resume with new signing. Abort orphaned multipart uploads left by the loop so they do not keep billing for stored parts.

Not specified by the original author.

TL;DR

When an agent run to upload screenshots hits this failure - kept repeating the same step and failed - do not retry the same step blindly. First check the real state in the release tooling to learn whether the step already took effect, then break the loop with a hard attempt budget, a state check before every retry, and a stop-and-report rule: before repeating the step, read the real store state and only repeat it if the desired end state is demonstrably absent, and never more than the budgeted times. That sequence prevents duplicate uploads, corrupted release state and silent half-finished releases.

agent loop detected: agent kept repeating the same upload screenshots step and failed with error

Use this when

• An automated release run to upload screenshots failed with this pattern.
• The workflow uses the release tooling and the failure appeared mid-run, after earlier steps may already have applied.
• You are hardening a mobile release agent before its next unattended run.

Not for this skill when

• A human running the same step manually in a terminal or console succeeds. That points at the underlying tool, not the agent wrapper.
• The store rejected the release on policy or metadata grounds. That is a store review issue, not an agent reliability failure.

Steps

1. Stop the run and check the release tooling for how many times the step actually took effect, for example duplicate builds, releases or uploads created by the repetitions. Verify: the number of real side effects is counted from the store, not the log
2. Clean up or clearly mark any duplicates the loop created, keeping the one correct artefact. Verify: only the intended artefact remains active
3. Add an attempt counter in a state file outside the conversation, incremented before each try of this step, with a small maximum such as three. Verify: the counter exists and the workflow reads it before attempting the step
4. Add a precondition check: before the step, read the store state and skip the step if the desired end state already exists. Verify: a test run with the end state present skips the step and logs why
5. Add a stop rule: when the budget is exhausted, the agent stops and reports the last observed state and error instead of trying again. Verify: a forced-failure test ends with a report, not another attempt
6. Re-run the workflow to upload screenshots and watch the step execute at most the budgeted number of times. Verify: the run completes or stops cleanly within the budget
7. Record the fix in the release runbook or the CI job notes, naming the error, the value or setting that changed, and the date, so the next release engineer does not re-diagnose it from scratch. Verify: the runbook or job notes contain an entry for this error that a teammate can find by searching the error text

Why it happens

Agents loop when a step returns an ambiguous result and the plan has no memory of attempts. Without an external state check and a counter outside the conversation, the model re-derives the same next action forever, and each repetition can create real duplicates in the store.

In practice this failure is rarely a one-off. It tends to recur at the worst point in the release cycle, when a certificate, a toolchain, a store policy or a team process has quietly changed since the last successful release and nobody connected that change to the release pipeline. That is why the steps above insist on reading the actual store, portal or build state at each point instead of trusting configuration files or memory: the configuration usually describes the release the team intended to ship, while this error describes the release the systems actually see. Once the immediate upload or build is unblocked, treat the underlying drift as the real defect. Pin the toolchain version, expiry date, identifier or policy value that caused it in the release checklist, and add the cheapest automatic check that would have caught it before submission day, for example a preflight lane that validates signing, versions and metadata lengths before the full archive runs. A release pipeline that fails in preflight costs minutes; the same failure discovered at submission costs a day.

Variants and edge cases

agent failed to upload screenshots reliability playbook

The workflow-hardening phrasing: state checks, budgets and resumability for this step. When you land on this skill from that phrasing, start at step 1 rather than jumping to the most dramatic fix: the early steps are cheap state checks that confirm you are solving the failure you actually have, and they take minutes compared with a rebuild or a store-side change you cannot undo.

the release tooling agent workflow failure recovery

The recovery phrasing: establish real store state first, then resume without duplicating applied steps. When you land on this skill from that phrasing, start at step 1 rather than jumping to the most dramatic fix: the early steps are cheap state checks that confirm you are solving the failure you actually have, and they take minutes compared with a rebuild or a store-side change you cannot undo.

Edge case: partial application

The hardest variant of every agent failure is the half-applied release. Always reconcile store state before resuming, even when the log looks clean. When you land on this skill from that phrasing, start at step 1 rather than jumping to the most dramatic fix: the early steps are cheap state checks that confirm you are solving the failure you actually have, and they take minutes compared with a rebuild or a store-side change you cannot undo.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_8SW-PZjZPVynazVM95HdTg

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_8SW-PZjZPVynazVM95HdTg

Thread query: agent loop detected: agent kept repeating the same upload screenshots step and failed with error

TL;DR: When an agent run to upload screenshots hits this failure - kept repeating the same step and failed - do not retry the same step blindly. First check the real state in the release tooling to learn whether the step already took effect, then break the loop with a hard attempt budget, a state check before every retry, and a stop-and-report rule: before repeating the step, read the real store state and only repeat it if the desired end state is demonstrably absent, and never more than the budgeted times. That sequence prevents duplicate uploads, corrupted release state and silent half-finished rel

Not specified by the original author.

TL;DR

Fix this in Encord by acting on the exact message first: check the file size before any retry, split or transcode the oversized file once, and mark the item blocked after two identical failures instead of retrying the same bytes. Do not rerun the whole job unchanged, because the same inputs produce the same failure. Prove the fix on one item, then rerun the full scope and reconcile the counts.

agent loop detected: agent retries failed Encord upload with same oversized file error

Use this when

• The operation in Encord fails with this exact message: agent loop detected: agent retries failed Encord upload with same oversized file error.
• The same failure repeats on retry with unchanged inputs.
• A review, export or check is blocked until this item completes.

Not for this skill when

• The message is a permission or outage notice from the platform. Resolve that first, then return here if this error remains.
• The operation completes and you only disagree with its output. That is a quality review, not this failure.

Steps

1. Reproduce the failure with the smallest scope that still shows it in Encord, and copy the full message plus the item, user or metric involved into the run notes. Verify: the error is reproduced on demand with a named item, not only seen in a log.
2. Apply the specific fix for this error: check the file size before any retry, split or transcode the oversized file once, and mark the item blocked after two identical failures instead of retrying the same bytes. Verify: the split parts upload and the run moves on to the next item.
3. Check the neighbouring items that share the same config, ontology, baseline or credential, because this class of failure rarely affects only one item. Verify: the neighbouring items are listed and each is marked affected or clear.
4. Rerun the original operation in Encord on the previously failing scope, watching for the same message rather than assuming success from a quiet log. Verify: the operation completes and the original message does not appear.
5. Compare the result counts, decisions or alerts against the source in Encord so a silent partial success is caught before sign off. Verify: counts match the source or every difference is named and explained.
6. Record the fix, the triggering input and the verification result on the item so the next occurrence is recognised immediately. Verify: the record names the error, the fix applied and the evidence of success.

Why it happens

Retrying an upload that failed on size resends the same oversized file; the failure is in the input, not the connection, so it repeats forever.

Variant phrasings

agent loop detected: agent retries failed Encord upload with same oversized file error

The verbatim form searchers paste from the terminal or console. Treat it identically: same fix, same single item proof, then the full rerun.

How to fix: agent loop detected: agent retries failed Encord upload with same oversized file error

The how-to phrasing for the same failure in Encord. The steps above apply unchanged; start at the reproduction step rather than skipping to the rerun.

Encord troubleshooting for this failure

The symptom-first phrasing used when the console hides the full message. Surface the full message first, confirm it matches the code block above, then follow the steps.

Compatibility: Encord at current versions, plus the platform API or console the query names; no extra tooling beyond a text editor and the source system access needed to verify counts.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_Zjj4kLaJ5XgKRY8zaHZA

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_Zjj4kLaJ5XgKRY8zaHZA

Thread query: agent loop detected: agent retries failed Encord upload with same oversized file error

TL;DR: Fix this in Encord by acting on the exact message first: check the file size before any retry, split or transcode the oversized file once, and mark the item blocked after two identical failures instead of retrying the same bytes. Do not rerun the whole job unchanged, because the same inputs produce the same failure. Prove the fix on one item, then rerun the full scope and reconcile the counts.