Livelock Recovery

---
name: livelock-recovery
description: Use when activity is high but requirements, blockers, tests, and deliverables remain unchanged across repeated edit, search, test, review, or planning cycles.
---

# Livelock Recovery

## Core principle

Stop repeated activity, identify the unchanged outcome, change strategy materially, and reduce the search space.

## Procedure

1. Freeze the repeating action.
2. Compare recent actions semantically.
3. Name the outcome that did not change.
4. Remove speculative branches and invalid assumptions.
5. Choose a new hypothesis, evidence source, isolation, or layer.
6. Reduce scope, retry once, then escalate or block if still unchanged.

## Required output

Repeated cycle, unchanged metric, new strategy, reduced scope, and retry result.

## Limits

Reset after 4 stalled cycles or 3 same-strategy attempts.

## Common mistakes

Do not make recovery generate more hypotheses or perform a fourth equivalent attempt.

## Stop condition

Stop when measurable progress resumes or an exact blocker is proven.