Figure 8.4: One-shot retrieval versus an agentic loop
Figure 8.4 One-shot retrieval versus an agentic loop. The faded strip at the top is
the classic pipeline: retrieve once, use what came back, no way to recover a bad
pull. The cycle below adds the one thing that strip lacks—an evaluate
step and, in accent, a return path that refines the query and retrieves again
until the results are good enough. Retrieval becomes a tool the agent can call
more than once, not a single fixed step.
