Agentic Design

Patterns
📊

Buffer of Thoughts(BoT)

Maintains a dynamic buffer of reusable thought patterns for analogical reasoning

Complexity: highReasoning Techniques

🎯 30-Second Overview

Pattern: Thought-augmented reasoning that collects diverse approaches in a buffer, distills patterns, and creates reusable templates

Why: Builds reasoning expertise over time by learning from diverse thought processes and creating reusable knowledge structures

Key Insight: Generate diverse thoughts → Buffer storage → Distill patterns → Create templates → Apply to new problems

⚡ Quick Implementation

1Thought Collection:Generate diverse reasoning thoughts & approaches
2Buffer Storage:Store thoughts in structured buffer memory
3Distillation:Extract key insights and patterns from buffer
4Template Creation:Create reusable reasoning templates
5Application:Apply distilled knowledge to new problems
Example: Problem → Generate many thoughts → Store in buffer → Distill patterns → Create templates → Apply

📋 Do's & Don'ts

✅Encourage diverse and creative thought generation
✅Implement efficient buffer storage and retrieval
✅Focus distillation on actionable insights
✅Create templates that generalize across problems
✅Update buffer with new successful reasoning patterns
❌Fill buffer with redundant or low-quality thoughts
❌Skip the distillation step (raw thoughts ≠ knowledge)
❌Create overly specific templates without generalization
❌Ignore buffer capacity limits (memory overflow)
❌Use stale templates without updating from experience

🚦 When to Use

Use When

  • • Problems requiring creative reasoning approaches
  • • Domains where experience accumulation helps
  • • Multi-step reasoning with reusable patterns
  • • When building reasoning expertise over time
  • • Complex problem-solving requiring diverse perspectives

Avoid When

  • • Simple, one-off reasoning tasks
  • • Domains with well-established procedures
  • • Memory-constrained environments
  • • Real-time applications requiring immediate response
  • • Problems with no reusable reasoning patterns

📊 Key Metrics

Thought Diversity
Variety and creativity of generated reasoning approaches
Distillation Quality
Effectiveness of pattern extraction from buffer
Template Reusability
Success rate of applying templates to new problems
Buffer Efficiency
Storage utilization vs reasoning performance
Knowledge Transfer
Improvement in similar problem-solving over time
Reasoning Innovation
Discovery of novel solution approaches

💡 Top Use Cases

Research Methodology: Collect research approaches → Buffer strategies → Distill best practices → Create methodology templates
Creative Problem Solving: Generate solution ideas → Store in buffer → Extract patterns → Build innovation frameworks
Code Architecture: Collect design patterns → Buffer approaches → Distill principles → Create architecture templates
Strategic Planning: Gather strategic thoughts → Buffer insights → Extract frameworks → Build planning templates
Learning System: Accumulate reasoning examples → Buffer successful approaches → Distill learning patterns → Create educational templates

References & Further Reading

Deepen your understanding with these curated resources

Academic Papers

Buffer of Thoughts: Thought-Augmented Reasoning with Large Language Models (Yang et al., 2024)

Skeleton-of-Thought: Large Language Models Can Do Parallel Decoding (Ning et al., 2023)

Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models (Wei et al., 2022)

Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (Yao et al., 2023)

Implementation Guides

LangChain Memory Systems for Thought Storage

OpenAI Advanced Reasoning with Memory

Anthropic Constitutional AI: Iterative Improvement

Microsoft Semantic Kernel: Memory and Planning

Tools & Libraries

LangChain ConversationBufferMemory

Llama Index Memory Systems

Chroma Vector Database for Thought Storage

Pinecone: Vector Memory for AI Applications

Community & Discussions

LangChain Discord - Memory Patterns

OpenAI Developer Forum - Advanced Memory

r/MachineLearning - Reasoning and Memory

Hugging Face Forums - Memory-Augmented Models

Contribute to this collection

Know a great resource? Submit a pull request to add it.

Contribute

Patterns

closed

Loading...

Built by Kortexya