> Some coding agents (Shelley included!) refuse to return a large tool output back to the agent after some threshold. This is a mistake: it's going to read the whole file, and it may as well do it in one call rather than five.

disagree with this: IMO the primary reason that these still need to exist is for when the agent messes up (e.g reads a file that is too large like a bundle file), or when you run a grep command in a large codebase and end up hitting way too many files, overloading context.

Otherwise lots of interesting stuff in this article! Having a precise calculator was very useful for the idea of how many things we should be putting into an agent loop to get a cost optimum (and not just a performance optimum) for our tasks, which is something that's been pretty underserved.

I think that's reasonable, but then they should have the ability for the agent to, on the next call, override it. Even if it requires the agent to have read the file once or something.

In the absence of that you end up with what several of the harnesses ended up doing, where an agent will use a million tool calls to very slowly read a file in like 200 line chunks. I think they _might_ have fixed it now (or agent-fixes, my agent harness might be fixing it), but Codex used to do this and it made it unbelievably slow.