you have never written an agent file, and you run agents every day
when it says it will explore the repo,
or go find where that is defined, that is a worker, not a step
fresh window, own context, none of your conversation
it gets the prompt from its definition, your claude.md,
a git status, and the task as the main model summarised it
so the three sentences where you explained why the obvious answer is wrong are not in the room where the search happens
the built in ones are single shot, they cannot be resumed,
so a thin answer means starting over, not continuing
my claude.md is sixty seven lines,
about seven hundred and forty tokens, and that travels with every worker
the reasoning you typed does not travel at all
the fix is unglamorous, put the constraint in the sentence that starts the task, not in the message before it
you were not watching it think
you were reading a postcard from a contractor who left while you were still talking