Tool calls are not comparable units — one MCP call can be worth five
WebSearches, and a paginated CLI fetch is different again. A flat
numeric cap created false precision while penalizing topics that
legitimately needed more work.
The Stop Heuristic is now grounded entirely in progress signals:
sources repeating, synthesis not changing, external signal thin. The
agent decides when enough is enough based on whether it is still
learning, with an explicit "bias toward stopping early" framing so
the absence of a numeric backstop does not become an excuse to keep
going.
Trevin Chow
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