They also tend to imply symbolic recursion which seems to be the biggest deal out of everything by a wide margin.

When you can nest 10+ agents deep and guarantee you will get back home without losing any data in any of the stack frames, the ability to chunk through complex problems goes up dramatically.

My first thought was also that this is also reminiscent of RLMs - they are ought to solve the same problem as far as my understanding goes. Authors say "Self-improving AI systems aim to reduce reliance on human engineering by learning to improve their own learning and problem-solving processes" which is what RLM is trying to solve so my understanding is that this work shares the same goal but takes a different approach. E.g. instead of using REPL-like environment with multiple (or even single) agents, which is what RLMs are doing, they suggest using agents that can modify themselves. I didn't read the paper so I don't know how this really works but it caught my attention so if you could share more insights I would appreciate it.