Agents From First Principles 03: AI Agent Keeps Making the Same Mistake? Add a Critique-and-Revision Loop

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:23:00 +0100

An AI agent can fail in a particularly frustrating way: it produces an answer that is almost right, you ask it to improve the answer, and it produces another answer with the same underlying defect.

Sometimes the wording changes. Sometimes it adds more explanation. Sometimes it becomes longer and more confident. But the important mistake survives.

That usually means the system is doing this:

prompt
  ↓
model
  ↓
answer

or this:

Reflection on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

Agents From First Principles 03: AI Agent Keeps Making the Same Mistake? Add a Critique-and-Revision Loop