Progressive disclosure helps long-context agents only when document navigation is already failing

omarsar0 · x · 2026-07-22

A new study argues that progressive disclosure in agents does not scale uniformly and depends heavily on the agent harness.

The pattern gives an agent a document path and lets it decide what to read, from a short description down to specific passages.
On single-book tasks, the gains vary: large when the harness is weak at navigation, near zero when the harness already retrieves well.
On many-book tasks, raw navigation collapses, one level of disclosure helps, and a second routing layer can even hurt accuracy.
The takeaway: progressive disclosure buys context, not intelligence, and only becomes decisive when the corpus is too large to navigate directly.

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

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