More Knowledge ≠ Smarter LLM

Putting more knowledge into an LLM’s context window does not make the model smarter. The context window is limited. Increasing knowledge in context degrades performance.

Only the relevant information matters—and only what’s needed for each turn.

I tested harness2 recently. Some tasks went from ~3 minutes to 30 minutes. Steps failed. The LLM needed more tokens to diagnose and retry. Overall success rate stayed the same.

The lesson: agent self-evolving is promising but has a long way to go. Carefully selecting what the agent sees is still more important than giving it everything.