From ad54ad6ccaa0b9f1c9f0773df60f3515d5fb1e68 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Shreyansh Sancheti <43677304+shreyanshjain7174@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:39:15 +0530
Subject: [PATCH] docs: add honest prior-art positioning to README

ANF is a supporting internal tool, not a novel format or published research.
Acknowledge prior art (TOON/TRON/TSLN) and the independent agentic benchmarks
(arXiv 2605.29676, 2606.01326) showing compact notations give modest,
accuracy-costly gains. State plainly that ANF's savings come from view
extraction, not notation.

Signed-off-by: Shreyansh Sancheti <43677304+shreyanshjain7174@users.noreply.github.com>
---
 README.md | 16 ++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+)

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 6d9ca27..80cad79 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -69,6 +69,22 @@ the capabilities the intent needs. Measured against the MCP baseline:
 Full data in
 [`results/2026-05-02-week3-summary.md`](results/2026-05-02-week3-summary.md).
 
+## Prior art and honest positioning
+
+ANF is not a novel serialization format, and this is not published research. The
+token-efficient-format space is already crowded: TOON, TRON, and TSLN cover
+compact JSON-style encodings. Independent work is also sobering about the
+approach. The "Notation Matters" agentic benchmark (arXiv 2605.29676) finds
+compact notations save roughly 18-27% inside real agent loops and cost accuracy.
+State-in-context minification (arXiv 2606.01326) reports about 42% with a 12pp
+accuracy drop.
+
+So ANF does not compete on notation. Most of its token savings come from view
+extraction: dropping irrelevant fields and surfacing the decision-relevant state
+(health, alerts, available actions), not from compressing the syntax. Treat ANF
+as a supporting internal tool for that view extraction, grounded in the
+literature above, not as a groundbreaking format.
+
 ## Repository layout
 
 ```text