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COMPEL Glossary / react

ReAct

An agentic prompt pattern interleaving reasoning steps (Thought) and action steps (Act — typically a tool call) over multiple turns, with observations from each action feeding the next reasoning step.

What this means in practice

Foundation pattern for modern tool-using agents; inappropriate for short, single-step tasks because the overhead dominates.

Synonyms

ReAct pattern , Reason-and-Act

See also

  • Tool use / function calling — A prompt pattern authorizing the model to request named functions with structured arguments — searching the web, reading a database, calling a calculator, triggering an API — rather than generating all answers from its weights.
  • Reflection — An agentic prompt pattern where the model critiques and revises its own output — typically after tool-call feedback or detected error — before returning a final answer.
  • Chain-of-thought (CoT) — A prompt pattern that elicits intermediate reasoning steps before the final answer — either zero-shot ("Let's think step by step") or few-shot with example reasoning chains.
  • Agentic AI — Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of taking autonomous actions in the world, making decisions, using external tools, and pursuing multi-step goals with minimal or no human intervention at each step.

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