Planner agent gets stuck in infinite loop when planning undefined projects #9445

Bug Description

The Planner agent enters an infinite loop when invoked to plan a project that doesn't have existing specs or documentation in the codebase. The agent was invoked via @planner develop opencode-council-swarm and got stuck, requiring manual abort.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Start an opencode session
2. Invoke the planner agent with a project that doesn't exist: @planner develop opencode-council-swarm
3. Observe the agent spinning indefinitely until manually aborted

Expected Behavior

The planner should:

1. Search for existing specs/docs (reasonable timeout)
2. If nothing found, acknowledge this and either:
   • Ask clarifying questions about what the project should be
   • Create a plan based on the project name semantics ("council-swarm" suggests multi-agent coordination)
   • Return a "no context found" response with suggestions

Actual Behavior

The agent enters an infinite loop, likely:

• Repeatedly searching the same locations
• Making identical exploration queries
• No termination condition or max iteration limit

Root Cause Hypothesis

1. No exploration timeout/limit - The planner's exploration phase has no max iterations
2. Recursive search pattern - When no results found, it may retry the same search
3. Missing early-exit condition - No check for "zero context found, ask user"
4. Model looping - The claude-opus-4.5 model may be generating identical tool calls repeatedly

Proposed Fixes

Short-term

• Add max iteration limit (e.g., 10 exploration attempts)
• Add timeout for planning phase (e.g., 60 seconds)
• Detect repeated identical tool calls and break

Long-term

• Planner should have explicit "context gathering" phase with bounded scope
• If no specs/docs found after N attempts, prompt user for requirements
• Add loop detection at the Task tool level

Environment

• Agent: planner.md (subagent mode)
• Model: github-copilot/claude-opus-4.5
• Temperature: 0.2
• Invocation: @planner develop opencode-council-swarm

Related Context

The planner agent is configured at ~/.config/opencode/agents/planner.md and is designed to create .ralph-plan-*.md files for autonomous execution by Ralph. The loop appears to occur in the exploration phase before any plan file is created.

Additional Notes

This is a usability issue that wastes user time and API tokens. The agent should fail gracefully rather than loop indefinitely.