Minimal agents also allow room for more focused add-on tools/infra. I'm working on a context management layer[1] and it's very difficult to do well. In our benchmarking, we've observed simple harnesses like Stirrup[2] outperforming more elaborate ones.

[1] https://www.induction.ai/docs/context-management [2] https://github.com/ArtificialAnalysis/Stirrup