Creativity · Agent Protocol
Reflection Agent Pattern
Reflection is a self-critique pattern: after producing a first answer, the agent is prompted to review its own work, identify errors or omissions, and revise. A common variant uses two agents — a generator and a reviewer — with the reviewer playing the critical role. Papers like Reflexion and Self-Refine showed that this simple loop can noticeably improve quality on code, writing, and reasoning tasks.
Protocol facts
- Sponsor
- open research pattern
- Status
- stable
- Spec
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11366
- Interop with
- LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, A2A
Frequently asked questions
Does reflection always help?
Usually, but not always. Reflection helps most on tasks with verifiable structure — code, math, factual writing — where a reviewer can spot concrete errors. On open-ended creative tasks the second pass sometimes makes things blander.
Is reflection the same as chain-of-thought?
No. Chain-of-thought is thinking in the middle of one answer. Reflection is producing an answer, then explicitly stepping back to critique it — usually with a separate prompt or agent.
One agent or two?
Both work. Two-agent reflection (generator + reviewer) tends to catch more errors because the reviewer isn't anchored by having written the draft, but it costs more.
Sources
- Shinn et al. — Reflexion — accessed 2026-04-20