Wiping the Transcript Was the Worst Retry. Paraphrase.
A new arXiv paper measures the corrective value of a failed tool call in an agent transcript and finds it negative on every small model tested: repeat probability rises from 0.06 to 0.54. Clean-context retry was the worst harness tested; paraphrasing the failure removed 76% of the effect for free.
August 26, 2026 · 13 min read