I started building my agent loops based on the RLM paper and I am finding the recursive part serves two major purposes. First, it pushes down token consumption

I started building my agent loops based on the RLM paper and I am finding the recursive part serves two major purposes. First, it pushes down token consumption as you describe. The other thing it does is prevent the agent from returning too soon, since most of the real work happens at depth. Especially if you forbid tool use in the root. I am starting to wonder if maybe I could just focus on these aspects more directly as opposed to treating them as side effects of symbolic recursion. I do have to agree with the paper in that recursive depth beyond 1 doesn't seem to matter. At least not with the current frontier of models. If we can't recurse more than once and extract much uplift, then I question us labeling this a recursive scheme.