---
title: "Recursive · agent topology · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/design/topologies/recursive/
description: "Reason-act-observe loop converging toward a goal."
section: "Design · Topologies"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Recursive

Reason-act-observe loop converging toward a goal.

Verified against [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629)

- [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629)

A recursive agent loops on itself until a stopping condition is met: reason, act, observe the result, then feed that observation into the next pass. Rather than a fixed pipeline it re-plans each turn with fresh evidence. This is the shape behind most coding and research agents: the model proposes a step, a tool executes it, the outcome revises the plan, and the loop repeats until the task is done or a budget is hit. In anatomy terms it is the reasoning core wired to its own working memory and effectors in a tight feedback cycle.

## In the anatomy

The reasoning core, working memory and effectors form a closed reason to act to observe to revise loop; the policy perimeter gates each iteration's writes, and a budget or stop-condition bounds the cycle.

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Pattern | Recursive |
| State model | session |
| Example | Claude Code, Devin |

## Common use cases

## Strengths

## Weaknesses

## Agents using this pattern · 36

Mapping classified by the Field Book from each agent's documented control flow.

## Basis

Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.

## Verified against

- [https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629](https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629)

The corpus does not rewrite vendor documentation. Where copy is quoted verbatim it is marked as such and attributed to its source.