The Repair Is Not the Task: Execution Records and False Completion in Agent Recovery

When a tool call fails after a partial write, recovery must both restore a consistent state and complete the original task. Measuring how a correct repair's execution record shapes the rest of the task requires holding the repair and its successor state fixed. We show that once a compensating repair succeeds, its record can end recovery early, with the agent behaving as if the repair's postcondition were the task's; we call this failure repair-as-completion. We score every executed step against the authorized goal under an explicit execution contract, keep repair and task completion as separate outcomes, and continue one executed step under records that differ in nothing else. On a two-resource reservation task, the most recent record raises Qwen3-14B's safe completion from 2 to 33 of 40 completable units. After a compensation it ends the task: on 18 retail orders adapted from τ²-bench, Qwen3-14B completes all 18 from the current state alone and, with the record, declares all 18 complete while every order is still pending; after a forward repair, or a readback that leaves the same state, it proceeds with the task. Six of 27 models, each run with thinking off, stop on at least 6 more of the 18 orders with the record, four of them specifically after the repair, and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash also stops on a file-log task and on telecom lines. Under an exact completion gate before finish that states why it rejects, 100 of the 159 episodes that otherwise end in false completion finish safely, and offline Qwen3-32B verdicts on the stored prompts reproduce the same gated outcomes while accepting all 108 reached-state presentations. Restating the goal lowers the stop to at most 2 of 18 orders for Qwen3-14B and Qwen3.5-9B. Recovery benchmarks should report repair success and task completion as separate outcomes.