[LeoS1]

There are some great ideas in this post, namely the focus on human attention as the limited resource and the recursive decomposition of tasks. There were also a few points which I found unclear. You describe recursive decomposition as a "tree of DAGs ...". What do you mean by this? Is each node in the tree a DAG? Secondly, I agree that the tree is exponentially faster than one agent scanning a flat list, but are you not running exponentially more "scanning" agents? If human attention is the only limiting factor this is fine, but is this not a problem if you have limited compute?

[ramstar3000]

Running more scanning agents exponentially is an interesting proposition as we scale to massive, continuously growing tasks. In my initial experimentations with well-defined tasks, the overhead has not been worth diving into yet, since latency has been low enough.

It would turn a slow search into a highly parallelised "MapReduce" problem. You trade a brief, massive burst of machine execution to keep wall-clock latency incredibly low for the human waiting at the top.

A tree structure means these scanning agents don’t just run wild. High-level nodes could aggressively prune entire branches the moment a scanning agent reports a dead end.