I’ve been running into this too. It’s especially frustrating when you ask Claude to explain one of its own terms or summaries, and instead of just defining it plainly, it sometimes goes through several rounds of tool calls before giving you a usable explanation. I really don't think such time/tokens should be wasted.

100%. It is crazy that the default response to everything is act then explain. It starts writing code or running commands and I’m just like my dude wtf are you trying to do, can you just clue me in first.