The harness and the LLM parameters are pretty essential to getting better results and reducing loops. Tweak the parameters and you can mostly eliminate loops without negatively affecting performance (it's a bit complex but ask a SOTA AI to guide you and it's not hard). The harness should also react more intelligently to failures; it can do things like return additional context or hints as it tracks error rates and avg duration of calls. Pi can be easily extended, and it's suggested by the author you modify it to perform better for your use case.