Open-Question Tension Store
Persist unresolved questions as a typed ledger with curiosity and intrusiveness scores — so they drive the agent's next inquiry instead of dissolving when the prompt ends.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
An agent that only responds to prompts never closes the loop on things it noticed but couldn’t pursue. A tension store gives open questions a home and a re-entry path.
📋 Context
The agent notices things it doesn’t fully understand in every conversation: an unfamiliar name, an inconsistency in what the user said, a thread dropped that seems worth revisiting. Without a store, these dissolve at turn end and never return — even if the agent would have acted on them given a quiet tick.
💡 Solution
Maintain an append-only ledger of tensions. Each entry carries: id, opened-at, topic, source, curiosity (0..1), intrusiveness (0..1), and expiry. On each idle tick, read the top entries by curiosity × intrusiveness as candidates for the next move. Intrusiveness gates ask-the-user-now versus store-quietly. Entries below a curiosity floor expire after a TTL. Resolution writes a closing event into the same ledger — the original entry is never edited.
Real-world Use Case
- The agent should initiate inquiry on idle ticks, not only respond to explicit prompts.
- Unresolved questions currently vanish at turn end and never return organically.
- There is an idle-tick body that can read top-ranked tensions and act on one.
Source
Advantages
- Open questions survive across turns and sessions without manual tracking
- Curiosity × intrusiveness scoring makes the next move defensible rather than stochastic
- Expiry plus a cap prevents the store from becoming a question graveyard
Disadvantages
- Score weights are opinionated — bad calibration suppresses real curiosity
- Self-write of tensions invites gaming unless the agent’s training discourages it
- Ledger growth is real even with expiry; archive paths must be planned from the start