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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17598v1
• Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:35:32 GMT
• Title: Is Progressive Disclosure All You Need for Long-Context Agents?
• Abstract summary: Agentic AI suggests a broader option, giving the agent the document path and letting it decide how and what to read.<n>Agent Skills, a standard for packaging expertise into an agent loads on demand, supply a ready mechanism: progressive disclosure.<n>We run the first controlled study of the pattern, comparing raw-document navigation and several designs of Agent Skills packs against a classical hybrid retriever.
• Score: 6.214989743502112
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Long-document question answering usually forces a choice between loading the whole document into the context window and bolting on a separate retriever. Agentic AI suggests a broader option, giving the agent the document path and letting it decide how and what to read. Agent Skills, a standard for packaging expertise into folders an agent loads on demand, supply a ready mechanism: progressive disclosure, which exposes only what a query needs, from a short description down to the specific passages. Practitioners rapidly adopted this pattern for book-length understanding tasks, but the evidence to support such choices has been anecdotal. We run the first controlled study of the pattern, comparing raw-document navigation and several designs of Agent Skills packs against a classical hybrid retriever across three agent harnesses and three model families on InfiniteBench. On a single book, the gain depends on the harness, running large when the agent navigates the raw document poorly but near zero when a strong agent harness already divides and retrieves on its own. When scaling up to tasks that span many books, raw-document navigation collapses while one-level progressive disclosure degrades more slowly and pulls ahead. A second, deeper routing level never helps and sometimes breaks accuracy outright, so one level is enough. Progressive disclosure buys context, not intelligence: it is redundant while a strong agent can locate the right passages itself, and decisive once the corpus grows too large to navigate by reading.

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