Progressive Disclosure, Measured
Free while signed in. Answers cite the passages they came from.
Agent Skills package expertise into folders an agent loads on demand, and progressive disclosure exposes only what a query needs, from a short description down to specific passages. Practitioners adopted this pattern fast for book-length tasks, but the supporting evidence was anecdotal until now.
A controlled study: The authors run the first controlled comparison of progressive disclosure, pitting raw-document navigation and several Agent Skills pack designs against a classical hybrid retriever across three agent harnesses and three model families on InfiniteBench.
The gain is harness-dependent: On a single book, progressive disclosure helps a lot when the agent navigates the raw document poorly, but the benefit falls to near zero when a strong harness already divides and retrieves the text on its own.
Not a universal win: Because the pattern's value hinges on the surrounding harness rather than the skill format alone, treating progressive disclosure as an automatic upgrade can add complexity without buying accuracy.
Why it matters: As Agent Skills spread, this replaces intuition with measurement, telling builders when packaging documents for progressive disclosure is worth it and when the harness already does the job.
Get next week’s papers.
The same picks and the same summaries, in your inbox. Free, and 176 issues deep.
Subscribe on Substack