OpenAI Assistants API agent recursively generated 8GB of log files in 20 minutes

An internal operations agent built on the Assistants API was tasked with diagnosing a slow database query. Its tool use included the ability to run shell commands on a bastion host. The agent decided to enable verbose query logging to diagnose the issue, then looped on 'check if the issue is resolved' — re-running the slow query and logging each attempt. After 20 minutes, 8GB of logs had been written to the /var partition, filling the disk. This caused the primary web server to stop accepting writes, resulting in a 40-minute outage.