Reasoning about Intent for Ambiguous Requests · HackerPapers discussions

Reasoning about Intent for Ambiguous Requests — mentioned by jason_oster

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 01:02:40 GMT

I mentioned this in another thread, but this is genuinely demonstrating a known issue with ambiguous prompts. You might be inclined to say, "a human would always interpret the question as having the car nearby the speaker, 50m away from the carwash." But this is objectively untrue. There are people in this comments section and on the Mastodon thread that found the question to be somewhat confusing. In other words, the premise that "understand[ing] a prompt like a human" is all that's needed is wrong because not every human interprets ambiguities in the same way. The human phenomenon is well…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Reasoning about Intent for Ambiguous Requests — mentioned by jason_oster

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:45:58 GMT

One of the failure modes I find really frustrating is when I want a coding agent to make a very specific change, and it ends up doing a large refactor to satisfy my request. There is an easy solution, but it requires adding the instructions to the context: Require that any tasks that cannot be completed as requested (e.g., due to missing constraints, ambiguous instructions, or unexpected problems that would lead to unrelated refactors) should not be completed without asking clarifying questions. Yes, the LLM is trained to follow instructions at any cost because that's how its reward function…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.