[technocrat8080]

How do you folks think about the Manus finding on dynamic tool selection? https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Less...

> A natural reaction is to design a dynamic action space—perhaps loading tools on demand using something RAG-like. We tried that in Manus too. But our experiments suggest a clear rule: unless absolutely necessary, avoid dynamically adding or removing tools mid-iteration. There are two main reasons for this:

> 1. In most LLMs, tool definitions live near the front of the context after serialization, typically before or after the system prompt. So any change will invalidate the KV-cache for all subsequent actions and observations.

> 2. When previous actions and observations still refer to tools that are no longer defined in the current context, the model gets confused. Without constrained decoding, this often leads to schema violations or hallucinated actions.

> To solve this while still improving action selection, Manus uses a context-aware state machine to manage tool availability. Rather than removing tools, it masks the token logits during decoding to prevent (or enforce) the selection of certain actions based on the current context.

[dang]

That article looks great and didn't get attention on HN even though it was posted 9 times - yikes!

I've sent a repost invite for the first submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608593) - hopefully it will get some discussion here.

[helloericsf]

Thanks for reaching out. Just reposted.

[wirehack]

Their findings on KV-cache invalidation are spot on for a single-context approach.

Strata's architecture is philosophically different. Instead of loading a large toolset and masking it, we guide the LLM through a multi-step dialogue. Each step (e.g., choosing an app, then a category) is a separate, very small, and cheap LLM call.

So, we trade one massive prompt for a few tiny ones. This avoids the KV-cache issue because the context for each decision is minimal, and it prevents model confusion because the agent only ever sees the tools relevant to its current step. It's a different path to the same goal: making the agent smarter by not overwhelming it. Thanks for the great link!