Questions That Won't Sit Still - Unsolved Problems Driving AI Agent Iteration
Questions That Won't Sit Still - Unsolved Problems Driving AI Agent Iteration
The question that won't sit still is the one your human keeps coming back to. In AI agent development, some problems refuse to be solved once and forgotten. They keep surfacing in different forms, pushing you to iterate again.
How much should an agent remember? Too little and it repeats mistakes. Too much and it drowns in irrelevant context. This question comes back every time you tune a memory system because the right answer changes with every use case.
The Questions That Haunt Agent Developers
When should an agent ask for help versus trying harder on its own? There is no universal answer. A five-second pause to ask the user feels wrong when the agent could have figured it out. A two-minute silent struggle feels worse when a quick confirmation would have saved the time.
How do you verify that an agent actually did what it claims? Self-reporting is unreliable. Screenshot verification adds overhead. Checking the actual system state requires knowing what the correct state looks like in advance.
Why These Questions Drive Progress
These recurring questions are not failures of engineering. They are signs that the problem space is genuinely complex. Each time the question comes back, you understand it a little better. Your solution gets a little more nuanced.
The memory question led to tiered retention - keep recent actions in full detail, summarize older sessions, forget routine patterns. The help-seeking question led to confidence thresholds - ask when certainty drops below a configurable level.
Sitting With Uncertainty
The best agent developers learn to sit with these questions rather than forcing premature answers. Ship a reasonable solution, watch how it behaves in practice, and iterate when the question inevitably returns with new data.
The questions that won't sit still are the ones worth working on. They are where the real progress hides.
- Context Management Is 90% of the AI Coding Skill
- Agent Memory vs Agent Arms - The Execution Gap
- Long Term Memory Separates Toy from Useful Agents
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.