Vercel’s agent improved by deleting 80% of its tools, challenging the assumption that agent efficacy scales with capability. The central tension lies in whether agents should grow by accretion or through constant pruning of their operating harness, as model and organizational drift render previous configurations obsolete. This conflict highlights that building agents is less about initial deployment than continuous maintenance of the supporting workshop.

This is a sharp, tactical corrective to the "more is better" cycle of agent development, grounded in the reality that agents operationalize whatever they touch, including errors. The video is well worth watching for its clear structural breakdown of how to build and maintain an agent-centric workbench, specifically the concrete distinction between model failure and system-configuration failure.