AI enfeeblement, idle supervisors and the Peter principle in agents: 7. Gaps and caveats

7. Gaps and caveats

Five gaps look real after several search wordings each; the rest are places I didn't search exhaustively.

Gap	Status	Nearest work
Same model, tool switched off, tracked over tool-RL training	Real gap (~8 wordings)	Toolformer (one point, no harm), TRICE (SFT ablation collapses)
Closed-book recall after search RL	Real gap (3 wordings)	OTC-PO and R1-Searcher++ report call counts only
Free behavior of a supervisor generating tokens while a stronger delegate works	Real gap	Vend 2 anecdote, Fukui 2026 private-monologue measure, async systems that prescribe the wait
Peter principle tested with LLM agents	Real gap (5 wordings)	MoA role reversal, Guo 2024 leader reassignment, Rajguru 2025 scripted ABM
Dark room or active inference applied to human-AI delegation	Real gap as far as found	2026 cognitive-atrophy papers that don't mention it
Multi-week human RCT of LLM access with a washout test	Likely gap	Single-session RCTs (Bastani, Shen & Tamkin, Liu, Maier)
Weak untrained orchestrator over strong workers, strength swept	Not found, not exhaustive	W4S trains a weak workflow designer; Minions is the inverse

Caveats.

Many sources are 2026 preprints. A separate verification pass opened 30 of the less familiar citations and confirmed 28 as stated; the two mismatches were corrected above. I still have not read most of them past the abstract or key table.
Several human results rest on small samples (GPS n=13, Casner n=16, the MIT EEG crossover n=18) or self-report. The Google effect should be treated as not replicated.
I read the two dark room commentaries only through Sun & Firestone's summary, and could not open primary texts for the McGill isolation studies or Hembree & Dessart.
Agent behaviors such as the bliss attractor and side projects are model-version specific and will go stale; any agent-sociology result built on them should be dated to the model versions tested.
Cost figures in section 6 are order-of-magnitude estimates, not quotes. Check current API and GPU rental prices before budgeting.

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