Your Office agent should show you the changes, not write another report
Own-Sample-2904 · reddit · 2026-10-17
A common review anti-pattern for Office agents: the post-task explanation ends up longer than the actual spreadsheet changes, with the one overwritten formula buried in paragraph six.
Proposed handoff order:
- Shrink the handoff: report only objects changed (file/sheet/range/slide), checks that failed or weren't run, and decisions requiring a human. No restating the request.
- Preserve identifiers when compressing: workbook, worksheet, range, formula and error IDs like Sheet2!F18 must survive summarization.
- Read in the right order: touched files first, then deleted/overwritten content, then formulas/validation/external references; read check results before the agent's justification.
- Make the workflow prove itself: recalculation plus schema/structural/file-diff checks beat another "task completed" paragraph.
- Merge only after a human decides—nothing becomes the final artifact just because the status says done.
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