Agent Efficiency

Research agents have a bad habit that will feel familiar to anyone who has watched a junior analyst “verify one more source” for three hours. They search. They visit. They re-search. They validate the thing they already validated. Then, because the context window is now full of debris, they occasionally forget the actual question. A triumph of diligence, perhaps. A triumph of intelligence, less obviously. ...

Tools are where many agent demos quietly become invoices. A multi-step LLM agent may look intelligent because it reasons, acts, observes, and repeats. Under the hood, though, it often pays the model to decide every small next move: search here, load that node, look around, check valid actions, fill this argument, try again. Some of those decisions need judgement. Others are basically muscle memory wearing a lab coat. ...