Self-Refine Prompting

Self-refine prompting is an iterative pattern in which the model generates an output, critiques its own output against specified criteria, then produces a revised version. Typical implementations run 2–3 rounds, with diminishing returns beyond that. The pattern works best when the critique criteria are explicit and specific — vague self-critique tends to rubber-stamp the original answer. Self-refine is cheap because it requires no external verifier, but it also risks the model agreeing with its own mistakes; for production use it is usually combined with an external eval step or a separate judge model.