Rumination Agent

Problem

Short reasoning budgets and one-shot plans collapse these investigations into surface-level answers because the agent never gets to revisit its working hypothesis. Splitting the work across multiple agents (a lead researcher delegating to subagents) introduces coordination overhead, message-passing artefacts, and inconsistent reasoning across the team. A single agent that runs for hours without any explicit cycle structure either declares victory too early or wanders into unbounded looping, with no checkpoint where drift becomes visible. The team needs one agent with an explicit, repeatable cycle that can sustain a long investigation without losing coherence or runaway cost.

Solution

Each outer iteration runs five named phases: (1) think — emit an updated working hypothesis given the trace so far; (2) search — issue retrieval, browsing, or tool calls scoped to that hypothesis; (3) verify — check the new evidence against the hypothesis with explicit pass/fail notes; (4) revise — either narrow, broaden, or replace the hypothesis based on verification; (5) act — write findings, update an externalised plan, or commit an artefact. The loop terminates on confidence threshold, budget exhaustion, or explicit answer-ready signal. Context is compacted between cycles by replacing prior search dumps with verified-evidence summaries, so the trace stays linear in cycles, not in tool calls.

When to use

• The task is open-ended research where a short ReAct loop returns surface answers.
• A single model can hold the investigation's working state and you want to avoid multi-agent coordination.
• Hundreds of tool calls are acceptable and budgeted.