Regarding what #1 said about "Honestly, if you only have $200 left, you" should stick to tools, I think memory is the real MVP! I am totally obsessed with Mem0 Managed Memory API Cloud lately. It is fantastic at extracting facts so your agent doesnt repeat mistakes. This stops those loops and saves your budget! TL;DR: Use a memory layer to stop context rot and save tokens.

^ This. Also, Ive spent a massive amount of time in these trenches and while the debate between tools and memory is valid, there is a third piece of the puzzle. Back in the day, I built an automated outreach bot for a client... My plan was to give it a massive reflection prompt so it could self-correct. Ended up with a $400 bill and a bot that apologized for its mistakes 50 times in a row without actually fixing them. Total nightmare. Since youre doing lead gen for a marketing agency, you really need to look at orchestration. Tools like LangChain LangGraph State Management Library are a lifesaver because they let you map out the agents path as a state machine. The reason your agent is looping or forgetting is usually because it has too much freedom to drift. By using something like CrewAI v0.28 Multi-Agent Framework, you can break the lead gen process into tiny, manageable steps. One agent finds the lead, one validates the email, and another writes the draft. It saves a ton of money on your API budget because the prompts stay short and specific. Memory and tools are great, but without a solid structure to keep the agent on the rails, youre just throwing tokens into a black hole. Stick to a structured framework and youll hit that Friday deadline no problem.

Honestly, if you only have $200 left, you gotta prioritize function calling. I had high hopes for self-reflection loops but they are not as good as expected and just burn through tokens. Most of the time they just hallucinate more or get stuck in those annoying loops you mentioned. It is frustrating because everyone talks them up, but for a solo agency, you just need the thing to actually work. I suggest sticking with OpenAI GPT-4o API for the tool use since it handles CRM calls better than most. For the memory issue, unfortunately, those long context windows get pricey fast, so just use Pinecone Serverless Index to store your leads and history. It is way more stable than trying to shove everything into the prompt. Dont worry too much about it being perfect by Friday, just get the CRM integration solid first... thats the real backbone. If you get stuck on the API calls later this week, just shout.