Questions
An agent may stop mid-turn to ask its user something — which approach, which file, is this what you meant.
At the prompt
The question and whatever it offered are shown. The next line you type is the answer rather than a word put into the turn, and the status line says enter answer while that is so.
An answer is not held to the options. Every backend that offers them takes something else too — they are what the agent expects, and what an interface has to show for the question to read as one.
A question still up when the flow ends or is stopped ends with it, so stopping a flow is never blocked on one.
When nobody is there
hmz exec has nobody at a prompt, and /afk says so deliberately. In both cases the backend is told nobody answered and the agent carries on.
A turn waiting on an answer that is not coming is a flow that has stopped, so this is the default everywhere except an interface with /afk off.
From Python
agent.ask = lambda question: input(f"{question.text} {question.options} ")@dataclass(frozen=True)
class Question:
text: str
options: tuple[str, ...]Return a string to answer, or None for "nobody answered". Leave ask unset and it is None every time.
Whatever happens, the question also reaches anything watching the agent, as an asks event — so a flow can record that its agent wanted to ask without answering it:
def looking(agent, session, event):
if event.kind == "asks":
Path("questions.log").open("a").write(f"{agent.id}: {event.text}\n")
agent.watch(looking)The session on an asks event is None, whichever backend asked: a question is the agent's rather than one conversation's — ask is set on the agent, and it is the agent a stopped turn reaches. So a watcher can say which agent wanted to ask, as the one above does, but not which of its conversations did.
The other direction: a flow asking you
The reverse — the flow asking the person — is the person as an agent:
said = agents.human("Here is what I did. What next?")And with a schema, it is a questionnaire: a question per field, and the model built out of what they typed.
settled = agents.human("How should I do this?", schema=Settled, suppress=True)Each of those goes the same road a coding agent's own question takes, so /afk answers it the same way: nobody is there.
The moment, for a hook
NOTIFICATION is the moment that fires when the agent has stopped to ask its user something. A hook on it cannot answer — a verdict does nothing there — but it can log, notify, or wake something up:
agent.hooks.on(Moment.NOTIFICATION, lambda occasion: ring_a_bell(occasion.said))