Communicative Dehallucination

Problem

Without a way for the assistant to ask back, it complies by inventing a plausible value for the missing detail and proceeds as if it had been told. The fabricated choice gets baked into the next artefact and is hard to spot at the hand-off boundary, where it looks like a confident answer rather than a guess. By the time the wrong assumption surfaces — in a downstream failure or a user complaint — the trail back to the original gap is buried.

Solution

Define an explicit role-reversal protocol: when the assistant detects that the instruction is missing a deciding piece of context, it pivots and emits a focused question back to the instructor ("the precise name of the dependency, please"). The instructor answers, and only then does the assistant produce its conclusion. Bound the depth (one or two reversals) to prevent infinite ping-pong.

When to use

• Multi-agent setups where the assistant otherwise fabricates missing context to comply with instructions.
• A reverse-direction question channel between agents can be implemented cleanly.
• Fabrications would propagate downstream and be hard to detect at the artefact boundary.