At what tool count does your agent start getting dumber?

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

The author discusses how AI agents' reasoning degrades with too many tools, noting a cap of 20 tools by Genie Code, and invites community discussion on solutions.

Been noticing that past a certain number of tools, my agents stop picking the right one and start picking the plausible one. Somewhere around 15-20 the reasoning gets mushy and I start seeing weird choices — calling a search tool when it already has the answer in context, that kind of thing. Interesting to me that Genie Code caps MCP at 20 tools across all connected servers. First reaction was "that's annoying." Second reaction was that someone probably measured this and picked a number. Curious where other people's ceiling is, and whether you solve it by pruning or by routing to sub-agents with narrow toolsets.
Original Article

Similar Articles

Gave an agent 30 tools. It got worse at using the 3 that mattered.

Reddit r/AI_Agents

The author observed that adding more tools to an AI agent decreased its accuracy in selecting the correct tool due to increased classification complexity, and found that using multiple smaller agents with narrower toolsets improved reliability.

Your agent gets dumber the longer a session runs

Reddit r/AI_Agents

The article discusses how AI agent performance degrades over long sessions due to context window clutter from raw history, tool outputs, and repeated reasoning, and suggests solutions like summarizing old turns and trimming tool outputs to extend useful run length.