Behind the Craft · Sunday, June 28, 2026
Jess Yan contrasts basic prompting loops with more advanced self-recovering agents. She highlights that synchronous prompting loops are highly dependent on prior successful requests and struggle to pivot or handle errors gracefully, whereas self-recovering agents can manage errors and steer back on course.
“Yeah, so I think that if you're working with a raw prompting loop, um, then all of your work is highly, highly synchronous and you're constantly dependent on, like the prior requests that you strung together to complete successfully in order to get to the next step.”
“And I think that that worked in a world where we were just asking the, um, you know, the chatbot to write haikus for us and we were doing very, very simple tasks.”
“So, it's important for us to evolve towards these more self-running, um, you know, self-recovering agents that can recover from errors, recover from going slightly off course, uh, steer themselves back, and then just keep you in the loop as they're doing so, so that you are aware of their process.”