Robots Overthink Their Way Into Endless Loops, Proving Humans Aren't Alone in Analysis Paralysis
Ourtake
Turns out the cure for overthinking is the same for AI as for people: stop deliberating and just try something.
What happened
Researchers tested 19 language models on software engineering tasks using SWE-bench Verified and the OpenHands framework. They found agents got stuck in endless analysis, attempted conflicting actions at once, and quit early based on faulty self-assessment. Reasoning and non-reasoning models both showed the problem, and sampling several quick solutions and picking the least-overthought one raised solution rates by 25% while cutting compute costs by 43%.