The Best AI Fix Isn't Adding More: It's Taking Away
I noticed something interesting. Whenever an AI agent starts doing strange things, the immediate response of any team is to add more of something.
AI agents often face strange results when they don't have all the necessary context or tools. Instead of adding more context, tools, or logging, the best solution is often to remove excess. A team learned this the hard way while developing an internal support agent. Initially, they added 22 tools, but the results were slow and inaccurate.
They traced the issue to the agent carrying forward stale context from previous steps, with each log query dumping thousands of tokens. By reducing tools to 6 skills, loading only the necessary tools for each step, and removing raw tool outputs from the conversation, they reduced context per turn from 75k tokens to 18k. Response times dropped from 28 seconds to around 7 seconds, and accuracy improved significantly, moving from the low 60s to the mid 80s in internal evaluations. The only change was how much context the agent was given.
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