Map Reduce Question

[apsquared]

In my state I have a list of colleges and I am using a map reduce pattern to try to refine data about each college. However, what I'm confused about is when the reduce is happening or not happening.

Looking at the following graph

    # Add nodes
    workflow.add_node("agent", call_model)
    workflow.add_node("tools", tool_node)
    workflow.add_node("process_results", process_tool_results)
    workflow.add_node("gather_college_info", gather_college_info)
    workflow.add_node("data_gathering", data_gathering)
    workflow.add_node("generate_recommendations", generate_recommendations)
    workflow.add_node("debug_state", debug_state)
    # Add edges
    workflow.add_edge(START, "agent")
    workflow.add_edge("tools", "process_results")
    workflow.add_edge("process_results", "agent")
    workflow.add_conditional_edges(
        "agent",
        should_continue,
        {
            "continue": "tools",
            "end": "data_gathering"
        }
    )
    # For each college, gather more information
    workflow.add_conditional_edges(
        "data_gathering",
        gather_all_college_data,
        ["gather_college_info"]
    )
    #workflow.add_edge("gather_college_info", "debug_state")
    workflow.add_conditional_edges(
        "gather_college_info",      #"debug_state",
        should_continue_gathering,
        {
            "continue_gathering": "data_gathering",
            "finish": "generate_recommendations"
        }
    )

gather_all_college_data basically does the Send for each college

return [Send("gather_college_info", {"college": c}) for c in state["colleges"]]

As the code is alove (with debug state commented out) I was surprised to see that should_continue_gathering runs N times (where N is number of colleges). If I put debug state node in the graph it runs once. Is there an issue having the two conditional edges back to back?

[apsquared]

Still looking for clarity on this. It seems to be working fine when I put the no-op node in between, but that seems weird to me so I want to verify my understanding before continuing to build on top of this.