Vercel deleted 80% of its agent's tools and the agent got better.

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• Vercel’s sales agent case study: removing 80% of its available tools improved reliability — constraint and curation produce better agents than capability accumulation.
• Frames agent maintenance as a continuous discipline analogous to physical systems maintenance: agents drift not through model changes but through expanding context and tool access.
• Identifies seven components that deteriorate over time: job definition, contextual diet, memory systems, tool access, scope boundaries, validation methods, and measured value delivery.
• Practical takeaway: schedule regular “agent maintenance” reviews that audit each of the seven components and remove rather than add — drift toward complexity is the failure mode, not drift toward simplicity.