Self-Critique Loops: Have the Model Check Its Own Work

The basic idea

Instead of one shot at an answer, you run two: generate a first draft, then feed that draft back with a prompt like "review this for errors, then produce a corrected version." That second pass is the self-critique step.

Why not just ask for care upfront

"Please double-check your work" baked into the first prompt asks the model to write and verify at the same time, under the same train of thought that produced the mistake. A model that made an error is often anchored to the reasoning that led there - it's genuinely harder to catch your own blind spot mid-answer than to review a finished piece of text with fresh eyes.

What a separate pass buys you

A fresh critique pass reads the draft as a finished artifact, not as a chain of thought still in progress. That framing shift - from "producing" to "reviewing" - is often enough to surface issues that self-monitoring during generation misses, especially formatting slips, missed edge cases, or a claim that contradicts an earlier one.

The catch: self-confirmation

A model reviewing its own output shares the same blind spots that produced it. If it was confidently wrong about a fact, asking it to check its own fact tends to just restate the same wrong answer with more confidence. Self-critique is good at catching structural and logical slips, much weaker at catching a hallucination the model still believes.