The unmeasured LLM skill: knowing when to stop and ask instead of guessing

sunychoudhary · reddit · 2026-09-08

A daily local-model user argues that newer agentic coding models are great at pushing forward autonomously — which is sometimes the problem. With ambiguous requirements, the better behavior is to stop and ask "Do you mean A or B?" rather than reasoning for 10 minutes, assuming, calling tools, and confidently building the wrong thing.

This behavior is rarely benchmarked: we measure coding, reasoning, tool use, and context length, but not whether a model knows it lacks information. He asks which local models handle this best, and whether it comes down to the model itself, the system prompt, or the agent harness.

Original post →

More from coding & agent

coding & agent channel →