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Let an agent ask a question

An agent that hits a genuinely open decision — two equally valid options, an acceptance criterion that reads two ways — used to have two bad choices: pick one and hope, or stop. It can now ask, wait for the answer, and continue with it.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

  1. The agent asks. It calls question.ask with the question and, ideally, the explicit options. Offering options is what makes the answer unambiguous — “A or B?” can be decided in one tap; “what should I do?” cannot.

  2. You see it where you already look. The question appears as a pending decision on the usual surfaces — the approvals inbox in the web UI and the Telegram/Discord card — exactly like a paused-agent gate.

  3. A coordinator can answer it too. If the asking task was handed out by a coordinating agent, that coordinator sees the question in its own view of its subtasks and may answer it. This is additive: you still see every question, and you can still answer it yourself. A coordinator answering first simply means the work did not have to wait for you.

  4. The agent continues with the answer. The asking call blocks until the question is decided, then hands the agent your reply — free text, not just yes/no. No restart, no lost context.

The inbox — one feed over every source that can wait on a human, newest first, with the source filter chips above it.The inbox — one feed over every source that can wait on a human, newest first, with the source filter chips above it.

Which decisions an agent may take on its own

Section titled “Which decisions an agent may take on its own”

Questions are the only class of decision a machine is allowed to settle. Tool approvals, visual checks, danger escalations and model-tier changes stay human, always — a coordinator can see them and report that you need to act, but it can never clear them. A question is the agent asking; letting its supervisor answer is the designed flow. The others exist precisely because a human must look.

Writing work items that get good questions

Section titled “Writing work items that get good questions”

If you hand work to agents, an item that names its open decisions gets a question instead of a guess. In practice:

  • State the acceptance criterion precisely, and where two readings are defensible, say so and ask the agent to raise it.
  • Offer the options you would accept. An agent that can answer “A or B” asks a decidable question; one that must invent the options often just picks.