Cleaning an Agent's History Hurts When the World Still Holds the Error

arXiv:2611.14654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents accumulate histories of their own mistakes, and a system that compacts, repairs or hands off such a history decides what it says about those mistakes while their effects stay in the world. Prior work cleans the history at a fixed world, where showing a corrected step and saying it is done move together. We ask whether the same correct content helps or hurts depending on how the history states it and what the world holds. We freeze an agent mid-task with its exact world state, edit the history or the world, and let a receiver model continue.