Your Agent Isn't Reflecting. It's Performing Reflection.

Watch any modern agent framework long enough and you'll see it: the model produces output, then "reflects" on the output, then "corrects" itself, then ships a final answer. It looks like metacognition. It isn't. It's the same model, with the same weights, sampled twice, with the second sample conditioned on the first. There is no separate critic. There is no privileged vantage point. The reviewer and the reviewed are the same network — and the reviewer cannot see anything the or