Which Part of the Context Layer Does the Work? Separating Semantic Content from Retrieval Scaffolding in Text-to-SQL Agents

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.22259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Context layers, curated documentation that an analytics agent fetches at query time, produce large accuracy gains on text-to-SQL benchmarks. A with/without comparison cannot say which part of the layer does the work: the semantic content, the retrieval scaffolding that delivers it, or the pre-computed views that usually accompany it. We report a four-arm ablation on DABStep on four models that separates the three. The instrument is a data contract: