Why your agent over-engineers your simplest request (and the 3 prompts that stop it)

The request was eight words Monday morning. I open the outgoing email queue: six hundred and forty-seven drafts waiting, six hundred and seventy-two sent. Nobody clicks Send . First-contact emails are prepared by a pipeline and they sleep, because the last step assumes a human. That human, I had stopped believing she would have the time. I state the decision: automate sending . The response comes in seconds. Three levels of automation. Four channels. Three risk thresholds. All correct, all fit for a half-day architecture workshop. I had not asked for a workshop. Pauline walks behind me, glances at the screen, says nothing. Three timed reframes First reframe , brief: too strange, let's simplify . The agent drops two axes, keeps four residual layers, progressive warm-up over three weeks, deterministic anti-replay hash, configuration table in the database, manual Phase 1 followed by an automated Phase 2 to validate after two weeks of measurement. The target stays the same, that an email leaves without a human click. The path has grown accordingly. Second reframe , drier: simple, three safeguards, a kill-switch, we do this in one day . The agent re-architects, accepts the one-day target, keeps the three safeguards. But slips in three prostheses it calls industry standard : real-time dashboard, exponential retry, structured audit log in a new table. Each justifiable in isolation. None of them requested. Third reframe , shorter still: I don't understand why you're adding this . An opening line almost embarrassed, which I had never read from it before: "you're right, I'm over-engineering without necessity." And the version that should have arrived on the first round. A function that takes the draft record, checks three conditions, calls the send engine, returns. // lib/email-outbox.ts — generateFirstContactDraft (commit 3756e63) if ( ! EMAIL_REGEX . test ( input . email )) { return { success : false , error : ' email_invalide ' } } if ( BLACKLIST_EMAILS . has ( input . ema