Designing LLM Agents to Ask Questions When Facing Uncertainty

aestheticcode · reddit · 2026-08-17

A developer explores how to design an LLM agent that decides whether to ask a follow-up question when facing incomplete information, rather than making a blind guess. The use case is pediatric symptom assessment where parents might not provide full details initially. The agent should identify missing info (e.g., breathing difficulty) and ask. The author is considering Bayesian inference and HMM for uncertainty handling and question selection. The post discusses whether the LLM or a separate decision layer should handle this logic, and asks for advice on designing the loop, preventing endless questions, acting under uncertainty, and identifying potential failure modes.

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