# Does adding self-reflection to an agent make it more reliable?

No, not in ReliabilityBench: the simpler agent held up better. On Gemini 2.0 Flash, a plain ReAct agent passed 97.5% of clean tasks and 90.0% of reworded ones. The same agent with Reflexion, which adds self-reflection after a failure, passed 96.3% and 86.3%.

The gap widened when tools failed, with timeouts, rate limits, and partial responses, [three ways a tool call breaks](/answers/tool-calling/what-are-the-ways-a-tool-call-can-fail). From no faults to injected faults, ReAct's consistency score degraded 7.5% and Reflexion's 10.0%. Of the faults each met, ReAct recovered from 38 of 47 (80.9%) and Reflexion from 35 of 52 (67.3%), and Reflexion spent more extra tool calls per fault, 1.8 against 1.2.

The author's reading is that reflection may amplify a fault instead of fixing it, likely because its retry logic is more complex. The paper didn't test that cause. It's 20 tasks, two runs each, in a single-author preprint, so trust the direction more than the sizes.

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Sources:
- Aayush Gupta, "ReliabilityBench" (arXiv:2601.06112), Tables 6 and 8, Section 5.4: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06112 (fetched 2026-10-27)

Source: https://tessary.ai/answers/reliabilitybench/does-adding-self-reflection-make-an-agent-more-reliable
More on Reliabilitybench: https://tessary.ai/answers/reliabilitybench
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