Planning, Reasoning and Quality Control Terms
~15 min read
The 10 terms covering how an agent figures out what to do, improves through feedback, and stays within acceptable bounds — Planning, ReAct, Reflection, Evaluation, Guardrails and more.
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Key points
- •Planning breaks a goal into ordered steps; ReAct interleaves reasoning ('thought') and acting ('tool use') one step at a time instead
- •Reflection is the agent self-assessing its own actions — one specific instance of a broader Feedback loop
- •Few-shot learning teaches new behavior via a handful of in-context examples, no retraining needed
- •Evaluation measures whether all of the above is actually working against the agent's intended goals
- •Guardrails (hard limits) and Guidelines (softer policies) both keep agent behavior aligned, at different levels of strictness