Perceive: Reading the Current State

The loop this level names has three steps: perceive, decide, act. "Perceive" comes first — the agent looks at the current state of things, or the result of whatever action it just took, instead of working off a stale snapshot from when it started.

What counts as "perceiving" depends on the task. A research agent perceives the search results it gets back. A scheduling agent perceives which calendar slots are actually free. A coding agent perceives whether a test passed or failed. In every case, it's reading the real, current state before deciding what to do about it.

Perceiving isn't a one-time thing that happens only at the start. It happens every time the agent comes back around the loop, because the state can change between one cycle and the next — a search returns different results, a calendar slot gets booked, a test that failed now passes. Deciding based on an old, unchecked state is how an agent ends up acting on outdated information.

What does the "perceive" step of the agent loop actually involve?

An agent perceives the current state every time it comes back around the ____, not just once at the start.

Once an agent perceives the state at the very start of a run, it never needs to check it again.