---
title: "Reflection / Self-Edit · agent retrieval pattern · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/memory/retrieval/reflection/
description: "The agent reflects on past experience and rewrites its own memory blocks or system prompt."
section: "Memory · Retrieval"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Reflection / Self-Edit

The agent reflects on past experience and rewrites its own memory blocks or system prompt.

Verified against [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442)

- [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442)

## How it works

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Stage | Harvest |
| Phase | Write |
| Used by | LangMem (prompt optimizer)· Letta (self-editing)· Generative Agents |

## Trade-off

Compounding drift, bad self-edits propagate and degrade future behaviour.

## Basis

## Verified against

- [https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442)

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