Multi-agent livelock: when a critic and an executor politely hand the task back and forth forever
Livelock is the multi-agent failure that looks like diligence. A critic flags something, an executor fixes it, the fix trips a different check, and the crew spends real money making no net progress while every individual step looks correct. Why a per-agent loop cap cannot see it, the three shapes it takes (oscillation, escalation spiral, and the polite deferral loop), how to detect it from a hash of shared state instead of from the transcript, and a crew-level budget that turns an endless loop into a finite, reportable outcome.