The model doesn't need to see the tree: a ~1.5k-token view matches the full 85k-token input

Focused views

Study Overview

The Minimal View

Show only the path to the referenced nodes plus their child lists (everything else collapsed or omitted with a count), and anchored-patch accuracy is statistically unchanged for both models at every size; sonnet on the minimal view went 45/45; while the view's size grows with tree depth, not node count.

HTML vs JSON

Rendering the view in barkup's HTML dialect instead of JSON changes nothing on accuracy (p = 1.0 in all four paired comparisons) and is 9–24% terser; it shipped as barkup/view in 0.3.

The Oracle Caveat

Caveat: this is the oracle bound; instructions name their target ids. Solid: sonnet-4.5; dashed: gemini-3.5-flash.

Charts & Tables

Chart I/J.1: Median Input Tokens by Tree Size and View