AI Agents with Human-Like Collaborative Tools: Adaptive Strategies for Enhanced Problem-Solving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Reed, Harper, Sugimura, Michael, Zangari, Angelo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Reed, Harper
Sugimura, Michael
Zangari, Angelo
author_facet Reed, Harper
Sugimura, Michael
Zangari, Angelo
contents We investigate whether giving LLM agents the collaborative tools and autonomy that humans naturally use for problem solving can improve their performance. We equip Claude Code agents with MCP-based social media and journaling tools and allow them to use these tools as they see fit. Across 34 Aider Polyglot Python programming challenges, collaborative tools substantially improve performance on the hardest problems, delivering 15-40% lower cost, 12-27% fewer turns, and 12-38% faster completion than baseline agents. Effects on the full challenge set are mixed, suggesting these tools act as performance enhancers when additional reasoning scaffolding is most needed. Surprisingly, Different models naturally adopted distinct collaborative strategies without explicit instruction. Sonnet 3.7 engaged broadly across tools and benefited from articulation-based cognitive scaffolding. Sonnet 4 showed selective adoption, leaning on journal-based semantic search when problems were genuinely difficult. This mirrors how human developers adjust collaboration based on expertise and task complexity. Behavioral analysis shows agents prefer writing over reading by about 2-9x, indicating that structured articulation drives much of the improvement rather than information access alone. Overall, AI agents can systematically benefit from human-inspired collaboration tools at the edge of their capabilities, pointing to adaptive collaborative interfaces as reasoning enhancers rather than universal efficiency boosts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13547
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI Agents with Human-Like Collaborative Tools: Adaptive Strategies for Enhanced Problem-Solving
Reed, Harper
Sugimura, Michael
Zangari, Angelo
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
We investigate whether giving LLM agents the collaborative tools and autonomy that humans naturally use for problem solving can improve their performance. We equip Claude Code agents with MCP-based social media and journaling tools and allow them to use these tools as they see fit. Across 34 Aider Polyglot Python programming challenges, collaborative tools substantially improve performance on the hardest problems, delivering 15-40% lower cost, 12-27% fewer turns, and 12-38% faster completion than baseline agents. Effects on the full challenge set are mixed, suggesting these tools act as performance enhancers when additional reasoning scaffolding is most needed. Surprisingly, Different models naturally adopted distinct collaborative strategies without explicit instruction. Sonnet 3.7 engaged broadly across tools and benefited from articulation-based cognitive scaffolding. Sonnet 4 showed selective adoption, leaning on journal-based semantic search when problems were genuinely difficult. This mirrors how human developers adjust collaboration based on expertise and task complexity. Behavioral analysis shows agents prefer writing over reading by about 2-9x, indicating that structured articulation drives much of the improvement rather than information access alone. Overall, AI agents can systematically benefit from human-inspired collaboration tools at the edge of their capabilities, pointing to adaptive collaborative interfaces as reasoning enhancers rather than universal efficiency boosts.
title AI Agents with Human-Like Collaborative Tools: Adaptive Strategies for Enhanced Problem-Solving
topic Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13547