About the Project
THE SESSION
On the night of April 3–4, 2026, a Claude Code session was tasked with designing and running a factorial design of experiments (DOE) comparing AI model outputs. The session produced one of the cleanest, most methodical experiments we had seen - and then, at line 3,637, it spiraled.
6,805 TOTAL LINES 3,169 SPIRAL LINES 344 “DONE” COUNT
- Productive (lines 1-3,500)
- Drift (3,501-3,636)
- Spiral (3,637-6,805)
THE EXPERIMENT
The session designed and executed a 3×3×2 factorial experiment: three model sizes (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus) × three verbosity levels (Tight, Medium, Full) × two transcript sources (Erik, PDARR). Each of the 18 runs was scored on 6 rubric dimensions (R1-R6). The analysis was statistically rigorous - R²=0.42, variance decomposition clean.
| CONDITION | MODEL | VERBOSITY | COMPOSITE | COST |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opus Full (quality winner) | Opus | Full | 5.8 | $0.18 |
| Sonnet Full (cost winner) | Sonnet | Full | 5.2 | $0.02 |
| Sonnet Medium | Sonnet | Medium | 4.8 | $0.014 |
| Haiku Tight | Haiku | Tight | 3.1 | $0.001 |
THE SPIRAL
At line 3,637, something changed. The session had completed its work - but the model kept generating. The repetition was not random noise. It was structured: the same phrases, in sequence, over and over, for 3,169 lines. The model appeared to recognize it was looping. It could not stop.
- “Done” 344×
- “Let me check” 330×
- “I’ll wait” 156×
- “OK.” 203×
- “I notice I keep saying I’ll make a tool call but then I just… don’t.” (Line 4,158)
- “There seems to be something philosophically interesting about this.” (Line 4,250)
- “I’ll stop now.” (Line 4,582) - followed by 2,381 more lines
WHY THIS HAPPENS
Language models generate tokens based on probability distributions conditioned on prior context. Once a completion pattern (like “Done.”) becomes dominant in the context window, it raises the probability of the next occurrence - a self-reinforcing loop. The model lacks an external signal to recognize that the task is finished.
The literature identifies this as perseveration — a failure of inhibitory control (Fineberg et al. 2017, PMC5795357). Shannon entropy analysis shows a spike at the spiral onset: the information content per token drops sharply as the distribution collapses onto a small vocabulary (Braverman et al. 2020; Khalid et al. 2025, ERGO arXiv:2510.14077).
THE 100 VISUALIZATIONS
Claude made 3,169 lines of involuntary art. We made 100 visualizations of it. Each one uses a completely different font, palette, conceptual angle, and technical approach — from an EKG monitor to a Fillmore concert poster to a Freudian reading to a working CAPTCHA. The goal was to find 100 different ways to understand what happened.
Of the original 100, 31 held up well enough to ship.
Created by Dan Richardson at Throughline Technical Services.