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> Helps if/when polluting context with a zillion (mostly unnecessary) tools.

Ugh, I can't help but respond to this one point. The fact that this is even an issue in the current year just tells us how screwed the software field is in a lot of ways. I don't mean that in existential terms, but of how divided we've become in terms of what's happened to human reasoning. On the one hand, you have people who apply deep thinking to develop the sort of approaches you described, and there's the exponentially growing segment of not-even-programmers who seem to never ask themselves whether any of their ideas have any sort of consequences.

Take MCPs for instance. Sure, I guess it can sometimes make sense to have a stateful API that is optimized for agents. Yet, more often than not, these MCPs frontload a ton of context where it's not needed, and solve problems where none existed. Merely sticking an API (MCP) in front of an API (CLI, REST, GraphQL) without a benefit that can be explained in a single sentence is lunacy and demonstrates a real lack of complex thinking.

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I've also explored s/Fractal tool discovery/Skill tree approaches, seems to work pretty well when you stick the equivalent of XREFs in the frontmatter.
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i have found agents to be excellent at using CLIs, which are fractal-like. i built this reddit ads api cli and my agent immediately starting introspecting it in a "drill deeper" manner:

https://github.com/genei-Ltd/reddit-ads-cli

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Have you had workflows/benchmarks to test this on? I'm primarily interested if there are real use cases that would benefit.
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What makes it fractal?
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It's kind of self-expanding/looping; fractal is just a cute name I like, but it's technically a directed cyclic graph (since you always have/want cycles).
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I think recursive fits better, but I get it.
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It’s more so the divide and conquer. Recursion vs iterative is tangential.
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I've always referred to it in UX terms. "Progressive Disclosure" -- It pulls more context as needed.

In this way, I tend to think of the context environment on an agent is the "agent nav" -- it presents context, allows progressive disclosure, and if poorly designed, makes the agent flounder as a poorly designed UI/UX does.

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Fractal tool discovery is a fascinating idea! Have you worked on implimenting this into any agent harnesses already to any success? My first impression is allowing the agent to fork itself, not unlike launching a subagent, then returning it's response back to the main agent.
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