When Agents Go Quiet: Output Generation Capacity and Format-Cost Separation for LLM Document Synthesis
LLM-powered coding agents suffer from a poorly understood failure mode we term output stalling: the agent silently produces empty responses when attempting to generate large, format-heavy documents. We present a theoretical framework that explains and prevents this failure through three contributions. (1) We introduce Output Generation Capacity (OGC), a formal measure of an agent's effective ability to produce output given its current context state - distinct from and empirically smaller than the raw context window. (2) We prove a Format-Cost Separation Theorem showing that deferred template rendering is always at least as token-efficient as direct generation for any format with overhead ...
| Authors | Justice Owusu Agyemang, Michael Agyare, Miriam Kobbinah et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 April 2026 |
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