The Thinking Agent

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In the last chapter, you built a small agentic workflow in conversation. It had roles, visible state, a tool boundary, and a review loop.

Now we can strengthen the idea that made it useful.

generate
  ↓
critique
  ↓
revise
  ↓
compare
  ↓
accept, reject, or roll back

This is the architecture of a thinking agent: not because the system has private consciousness, and not because a model’s self-critique is automatically reliable, but because the system can externalize an attempt, inspect it, produce a candidate improvement, and decide whether the candidate deserves to replace the current version.

Agent Improvement on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

The Thinking Agent