YARI: Yet Another Repetition Intervention

YARI is a pi extension that detects when the agent might be stuck looping, and intervenes. Other extensions do this but I found them to be overly complicated for my use case. This one does only two things:

• Loop detection: If the same tool is called with identical arguments threshold times in a row (default 3), it sends a warning message.
• Thinking cap: If reasoning (thinking) output exceeds thinkingMaxChars between tool calls, it interrupts and sends a warning.

YARI is intended to be short (<100 lines of code right now) so that you can easily see what it does. It also supports customizable messages (one will be randomly chosen) so that you can avoid repetition in the warnings themselves, and have a bit of fun with it.

Install it

pi install npm:pi-yari

Or download and place extensions/pi-yari.ts in one of pi's extension directories:

• Project-local: .pi/extensions/
• Global: ~/.pi/agent/extensions/

In any case, restart pi or do /reload. You can check if it works by asking the agent to do something like "Run ls 3 times in a row".

Config options

YARI will look for a project .pi/pi-yari.json configuration first, or ~/.pi/agent/pi-yari.json if that doesn't exist. The config file is optional and all keys are optional. These are the defaults:

{
  "threshold": 3,            // tool calls before warning
  "thinkingMaxChars": 25000, // interrupt thinking at this length
  "messages": [              // custom warning messages (randomly picked)
    "Repetition warning: It seems like you might be stuck in a loop.",
    "Are you stuck? Maybe try a different approach."
  ]
}

Try /yari-conf to see the current config if you want to make sure your changes took effect.