How Much LLM Does a Self-Revising Agent Actually Need?

Researchers introduce a declarative runtime protocol that externalizes agent state to measure how much of an LLM-based agent's competence actually derives from the language model versus explicit structural components. Testing on Collaborative Battleship, they find that explicit world-model planning drives most performance gains, while sparse LLM-based revision at 4.3% of turns yields minimal and sometimes negative returns.