Recipe Overview

Certain problems benefit from alternating reasoning and action. A ReAct agent interleaves chain-of-thought with explicit actions (like web search or database queries). The issue it solves is incomplete reasoning. According to the Prompt Engineering Guide, combining reasoning with tool calls achieves better performance. For example, if asked a factual question, the agent might first think, then perform a search action, then reason about the results. This creates a feedback loop where actions inform reasoning and vice versa, leading to more thorough and accurate problem-solving than pure reasoning or pure action alone.