The Organization of Inference: Information, Resource Constraints, and AI Production

TL;DR - Controlled software-engineering experiments show that AI performance depends not only on token capacity but also on how task information and resources are allocated across planning and execution. Information-rich planning benefits substantially from larger budgets, while direct execution plateaus.

• Direct execution achieved 59.6% success at both 12,000- and 24,000-token ceilings.
• Information-constrained planning improved from 36.2% to 51.2%, narrowing its deficit by 15 percentage points.
• Giving a read-only planner access to the task issue increased success by about 16 percentage points at 12,000 tokens.
• Task-informed planning trailed direct execution by about 10 points at 12,000 tokens but led it by 29.6 points at 24,000 tokens.