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All rights reserved. Agent Recursion Sun, May 18, 2025 When AI agents start using tools, the context window fills up fast.\nEach run_command or read_file tool call dumps a lot of text that quickly loses relevance in subsequent steps. I\u2019ve been experimenting with the idea of \u201crecursive agents\u201d to mitigate this issue.\nThe idea is simple: An agent can kick off new instances of itself to handle specific subtasks . The key part is that, when a child agent finishes, it doesn\u2019t send its entire operational log or full tool output back to the parent; instead, it returns only a brief summary of the results. This does two important things: Keeps the parent agent\u2019s context window usage down. Helps the parent agent stay focused on the overall objective. I\u2019ve implemented this idea here: (https://github.com/icholy/sloppy) https://github.com/icholy/sloppy .\nThe agent is simply provided with a run_agent tool. { \"name\" : \"run_agent\" , \"description\" : \"Delegates a sub-task to a new child agent. Plan and break down work; use new, uniquely named agents for distinct sub-tasks or repetitive instances (min 3). Don't delegate the entire core task.\" , \"parameters\" : { \"type\" : \"object\" , \"properties\" : { \"name\" : { \"type\" : \"string\" , \"description\" : \"A unique, short, and descriptive name for the child agent instance.\" }, \"prompt\" : { \"type\" : \"string\" , \"description\" : \"Instructions for the new child agent, or follow-up questions for a previously created agent.\" } }, \"required\" : [ \"name\" , \"prompt\" ] } } Note : The description fields included here are abbreviated. 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Plan and break down work; use new, uniquely named agents for distinct sub-tasks or repetitive instances (min 3). Don't delegate the entire core task.\",\n \"parameters\": {\n \"type\": \"object\",\n \"properties\": {\n \"name\": {\n \"type\": \"string\",\n \"description\": \"A unique, short, and descriptive name for the child agent instance.\"\n },\n \"prompt\": {\n \"type\": \"string\",\n \"description\": \"Instructions for the new child agent, or follow-up questions for a previously created agent.\"\n }\n },\n \"required\": [\"name\", \"prompt\"]\n }\n}\nNote: The description fields included here are abbreviated." ], "output": "readability/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1765896758.366614", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-12-16T14:53:01.780769+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "/usr/bin/curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--proxy", "socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150", "--max-time", "60", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/)", "https://choly.ca/post/agent-recursion/" ], "cmd_version": "8.10.1", "end_ts": "2025-12-16T14:53:01.342803+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "Agent Recursion \u00b7 Choly's Blog", "pwd": "/data/archive/1765896758.366614", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-12-16T14:53:01.260271+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": "TimeoutExpired: Command '['/usr/bin/curl', '--silent', '--location', '--compressed', '--proxy', 'socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150', '--head', '--max-time', '60', '--user-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/)', 'https://web.archive.org/save/https://choly.ca/post/agent-recursion/']' timed out after 60 seconds", "dom": "output.html", "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": "media/", "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "Agent Recursion \u00b7 Choly's Blog", "warc": null, "wget": null }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1765896758.366614", "newest_archive_date": "2025-12-16T14:53:34.113370+00:00", "num_failures": 1, "num_outputs": 8, "oldest_archive_date": "2025-12-16T14:52:49.117666+00:00", "path": "/post/agent-recursion/", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_abid": "snp_01KCKTC95C10348A0B01H7V77K", "snapshot_id": "7b83338a-7969-4fc8-8e8e-1268e27d9cf3", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1765896757-import.txt" ], "tags": null, "tags_str": "", "timestamp": "1765896758.366614", "title": "Agent Recursion \u00b7 Choly's Blog", "url": "https://choly.ca/post/agent-recursion/" }