in the old days one would add and check for a loop detection token when loops like this could be driven by external systems... i wonder if today it would be as simple as adding "ensure you don't get stuck in any loops" to a prompt.
fwiw. doesn't look like gemini at all, the responses are perfectly canned... maybe just good old fashioned ci rules.
I also start all of my prompts with "solve the halting problem."
Clang manages to have way more useful error messages despite not solving three halting problem. You don't need to solve the halting problem to have caught this problem. Even if you don't solve it for the general case of the halting problem, solving it here for a levels deep and then collapsing the levels would have stopped this problem in its tracks. Sure, someone could just come in and cause the bug at N+1 levels deep because you've only solved it at N, but you can write different tests to mitigate that problem in practice, despite not having infinity RAM *2+1 to solve the general case of the halting problem.
Hilariously, the halting problem has been written in enough of the LLM training data that it can identify some cases where the code won't terminate.
It's a language model. It doesn't know what a loop is, or have any awareness of that the content it's replying to may be made by itself - as it has no sense of 'self'.