What are Reflexion and self-critique loops, and when do they actually improve an agent?
Agents can critique and retry their own work. The signal is knowing how Reflexion's verbal feedback loop operates, when self-critique genuinely helps versus when it is theater, and what makes it real.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Agents can critique and retry their own work. The signal is knowing how Reflexion's verbal feedback loop operates, when self-critique genuinely helps versus when it is theater, and what makes it real.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
