Your Agent Finished. What Exactly Did It Finish?

An agent says it has finished updating a document. The output looks sensible. It even includes a tidy summary of the changes. Then someone opens the document and finds the old version. There are several possible explanations. The agent might have edited a different copy. A tool might have accepted a request without completing it. A background process might still be running. Or the summary might simply be wrong. From the reader’s perspective, these failures look similar: the promised result is missing. ...

November 13, 2026 · 8 min · Richard Luo