When Agents Go Quiet: Output Generation Capacity and Format-Cost Separation for LLM Document Synthesis

arXiv:2604.16736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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