Optimizing AI Agents with Progressive Disclosure

AI coding agents waste precious context window space when given too much information upfront. Applying the Progressive Disclosure principle — revealing complexity incrementally — to agent design means keeping AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files minimal (like a table of contents), writing skill descriptions as short selectors rather than full manuals, and using file references so agents fetch detail only when needed. The same discipline applies to MCP server tool descriptions. The result is a higher signal-to-noise ratio in the context window, leading to better agent responses.