Why your coding agent buries the answer, and when telling it not to backfires

The i-have-adhd skill going around that stops coding agents from burying the answer: lead with the action, number the steps, no "Great question", no "Hope this helps". Good rules. We went and read why the model buries the answer in the first place, and the answer is two different habits that deserve two different treatments.

The first habit is padding, and it is free to remove.

It turns out, reward gains are largely driven by longer responses, and both major LLM leaderboards had to add length control because their judges preferred longer answers. The openers, recaps and closers are tokens a rater once liked. Nothing downstream depends on them.

The second habit is the reasoning paragraph, and it is only free to remove when the model has somewhere else to think. A language model writes one token at a time, so if it reasons in text, the reasoning has to come before the conclusion. Tests show what happens when you flip that order: reasoning written after the answer scored the same as no reasoning at all, while reasoning first more than doubled the score. Concise reasoning kept the value; absent reasoning kept none. With hidden thinking turned on, the visible reply can lead with the answer and the cost moves to hidden tokens. With it off, an answer-first rule asks for the verdict before the computation.

The third thing we looked at is where such a rule lives. A skill body enters the conversation once and fades as the context fills; an output style goes into the system prompt and is re-sent every turn. Both are still requests. The one enforced version is a JSON schema with a reasoning field placed ahead of the answer field, because structured outputs keep schema order.

Our take:

• Demand the answer first when the answer is a lookup, a path, a command or a status.

• Let the reasoning stay on the page, briefly, when the answer is a judgment and the model has no hidden channel.

• Put the rule where it will still be in front of the model on turn forty.