What question did this study set out to answer?

To measure whether progressive disclosure via a one-line-digest index effectively routes AI agents to relevant prose documents compared to direct associative search.

August 19, 2026Open Access

Reading More, Finding Less: A Pre-Registered Anatomy of Progressive Disclosure for AI Agents

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RARashid Azarang

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Implication

Pre-registered evaluation shows associative search outperforms digest indexes for AI agents, indicating routing failures drive errors rather than text comprehension.

Key Points

To measure whether progressive disclosure via a one-line-digest index effectively routes AI agents to relevant prose documents compared to direct associative search.
Tested AI agent retrieval policies comparing a one-line-digest index against associative keyword search (grep) over 102 questions, tracking read-level telemetry and failure modes against difficulty-matched controls.
Conducted a pre-registered public replication evaluating 120 frozen questions across a corpus snapshot of 141 documents to assess answer accuracy, wrong-stopping rates, and durable memory reuse.
In the primary test (N=102 questions), associative search located the correct document in 80.4% of cases compared to 52.0% for the digest index; correctly routed questions achieved 86.8% accuracy with no baseline answerability difference (Fisher p = 0.80).
In the pre-registered replication (N=120 questions), search surpassed the digest policy in overall accuracy (63.3% vs. 50.8%) and document localization (75.0% vs. 62.5%), while digest routing caused a 34.2% wrong-stop rate versus 18.3% for search.
Agent failures were predominantly driven by misrouting rather than comprehension deficits, with agents opening incorrect files in 43 of 47 primary failures and 42 of 45 replication failures, while durable memory was utilized in only 2 of 157 opportunities.

Cite This Study

Rashid Azarang (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a85634f03308d306e2d66dd https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21959970

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Implication

Pre-registered evaluation shows associative search outperforms digest indexes for AI agents, indicating routing failures drive errors rather than text comprehension.

Reading More, Finding Less: A Pre-Registered Anatomy of Progressive Disclosure for AI Agents

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

Reading More, Finding Less: A Pre-Registered Anatomy of Progressive Disclosure for AI Agents

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

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