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Showing posts with the label subagent storm

Lab Book 2026-07-24: Encountering and Hopefully Fixing Subagent Overflow

 I'm still seeing Sonnet fan work out beyond its model capablities using subagents. You can see in the window below that the Gas Town polecat has had to stop and compact its context before proceeding. The good news is that when these subagent work fans don't turn into storms, I'm seeing more thorough reseearch findings returned. The bad news is that with Sonnet's limited context, those findings occasionally overwhelm the polecat that started it all.  I found a preprint from MIT for using what the authors call recurive language models or RLMs. The general idea is basically what I'm seeing with subagents—split the task, split the context—but they have clever ideas about how to manage the output stages to avoid the exact overflows shown above. I'm still harboring my hunch that this all started with the advent of Sonnet 5. Anthropic's release notes include "Sonnet 5 is much more agentic than its predecessors. Testers described how it finishes complex tas...

Lab Book 2026-07-19: Is the Antrhopic Increased Token Deal Related to Fan Experiments?

 Working with Fable last week, I noticed that it can get very excited about fanning out tasks, (to the point of crashing my WSL session.) I experimented with prompting agents to split out tasks on their own, but haven't found a successful to do this yet. Consequnetly, I reverted back to my original prompt which does not explicitly call for task splits. Then, this morning, running on Sonnet 4.6, another task storm sprung up. I wonder if the new 50% higher token limit  till August is Anthropics way of buying themselves some head  room while they experiment with models creating subagents?  Are other  people seeing the same thing? It's particularly worrisome that Sonnet 4.6 has started a subagent storm becuase it really doesn't ahve the context to deal with the results.