More Tiers, Fewer Findings: When Agent Delegation Pays
TL;DR for operators Adding subordinate agents does not necessarily preserve more information. Under the paper’s calibrated retention model, a two-tier architecture retains only 53.6% as many original findings as a flat architecture processing the same workload. Summarization and delegation introduce losses that compound across tiers. Hierarchy can still be worthwhile for two different reasons. It reduces the number of potentially incorrect items entering the coordinator’s persistent context, and it can lower processing costs enough to accommodate more findings under a fixed budget. The calibrated model predicts an equal-budget crossover near 403 findings, but this is a structural calculation, not an experimentally validated deployment threshold. ...