From Chains to Trees: Why LLM Agents Need Structural Memory
Logs are useful. They are also lazy. A business agent that fails halfway through a product search, customer-support flow, compliance checklist, or research workflow will usually leave behind a long trace: thought, action, observation, thought, action, observation. The standard instinct is to read the failed trace as a chain. This step followed that step; the final reward was bad; therefore the chain was bad. Very tidy. Also very wasteful. ...