Is Progressive Disclosure All You Need for Long-Context Agents?

Agent skills do not make models smarter; they help models avoid wasting context while finding the right text. i.e. agent skills are not a universal replacement for search or stronger reasoning. They matter most when the knowledge base becomes too large for an agent to browse efficiently, and the simplest 1-level layout worked best overall. When an agent can search 1 book well, progressive disclosure adds little, but it helps across large libraries. A single routing layer preserves context better than deeper skill hierarchies across large document libraries. The team compared raw navigation, flat and deeper skill layouts, and a standard retriever across several agent setups. On 1 book, strong agents already searched well, so the flat skill brought almost no accuracy gain. With 20 books, English open-question accuracy rose from 0.257 under raw navigation to 0.462 with the flat skill. Strong agents gain little from prepared skill indexes until the corpus becomes too large to navigate. --- – arxiv. org/abs/2607.17598 Title: "Is Progressive Disclosure All You Need for Long-Context Agents?"