Advanced Agents From First Principles 06: Does One Agent Plan, Execute and Judge Its Own Work? Build a Planner-Executor-Critic Architecture

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 23:49:00 +0100

Does One Agent Plan, Execute and Judge Its Own Work? Build a Planner-Executor-Critic Architecture

A single model can often do all of these things:

understand a task,
decide what to do,
execute a tool call,
inspect the result,
critique its own work,
decide whether it succeeded,
and produce the final answer.

That is convenient.

It is also a dangerous concentration of responsibilities.

If the same component creates the plan, executes it, explains why the result is good, and decides whether the job is complete, then failures become difficult to localize.

Critic Agent on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

Advanced Agents From First Principles 06: Does One Agent Plan, Execute and Judge Its Own Work? Build a Planner-Executor-Critic Architecture

Does One Agent Plan, Execute and Judge Its Own Work? Build a Planner-Executor-Critic Architecture