Building Agent Benchmarks That Score When Models Question Broken Tasks, Not Just Execute
AdEvening3382 · reddit · 2026-11-03
The founder of HyperHat shares a design challenge from building an agent-direction benchmark: when task requirements contradict each other, the right behavior is to stop and question the task rather than execute blindly.
The emerging design sketch:
- Agents must identify the actual conflicting requirements and ask which takes priority; stopping without identifying the conflict earns less credit;
- Pair the contradictory task with a satisfiable control task, so questioning every assignment doesn't become an easy way to score;
- Verify the clarification actually carries through into the implementation.
Open question: how to score the quality of the question itself, not just whether one was asked.
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