Self-Improving Agents

Build agents that learn from experience and improve over time

Key Takeaways

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The Improvement Cycle

Execute → Evaluate → Reflect → Learn. This cycle repeats continuously. Typical improvement: 20-40% accuracy gain over 3-6 months without manual intervention.

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Feedback Quality Matters

Implicit signals (free, instant) + LLM-judge (scalable) + explicit ratings (targeted) + human review (critical cases). Hybrid approach balances cost and quality.

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Experience Replay Foundation

Store interactions, sample batches, train from history. Most stable learning strategy. Start with 100-500 interactions before first training cycle.

Online Learning for Personalization

Update in real-time for user-specific adaptation. Risk: catastrophic forgetting. Solution: Combine with experience replay for stability.

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Meta-Learning for Multi-Task

Train agent to learn how to learn. Enables rapid adaptation to new tasks with minimal examples. Requires diverse task distribution during training.

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Self-Reflection for Quality

Agent critiques own outputs, identifies mistakes, generates improvements. Best for complex outputs (code, reports). Requires evaluation capability.

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Four Core Components

Memory Store (save interactions), Evaluator (assess quality), Learning Engine (update from experience), Monitor (track progress). All four needed for complete system.

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Monitor Improvement Rate

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Incremental Updates

Small, frequent updates (hourly) beat large, rare updates (weekly). Faster adaptation, safer rollback. Version snapshots before each update.

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Staging to Production

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What You've Learned

✓ The four-stage improvement cycle and how to implement it

✓ How to collect and use feedback from multiple sources

✓ Four learning strategies: Experience Replay, Online Learning, Meta-Learning, Self-Reflection

✓ Production-ready code for memory, evaluator, learner, and monitor components

✓ Best practices for staged deployment and continuous monitoring

Implementation