XIII · Cognition & IntrospectionEmerging★

Open-Question Tension Store

also known as Tension Ledger, Unresolved-Pull Stack, Curiosity Inbox

Persist the agent's unresolved questions as a typed ledger so they drive its next inquiry instead of dissolving when the prompt ends.

This pattern helps complete certain larger patterns —

  • used-bySocratic Questioning Agent★— Drive the agent toward its goal by asking the user a sequence of strategic, open-ended questions that surface the user's own latent knowledge, goal, or context — rather than producing an answer directly.

Context

A team is running a long-lived agent that is meant to initiate inquiry on its own — to ask follow-up questions, look things up between turns, return to half-understood references — rather than only responding when prompted. In every conversation the agent notices things it does not fully understand: a name it has not heard before, an inconsistency in what the user just said, a thread the user dropped that seems worth picking back up later.

Problem

By default these unresolved pulls vanish at the end of the turn that produced them. There is no surface to record what was noticed-but-not-followed-up, so the next idle moment starts as if from scratch and the agent's curiosity decays into amnesia between sessions. Even if the agent jots open questions into its general thought stream, nothing ranks them or surfaces the most worthwhile one when there is finally time to chase it, so they pile up undifferentiated and unactioned.

Forces

  • An inbox grows without bound if every passing thought becomes a tension.
  • A score is needed to rank which question to pull now — pure recency rewards trivia.
  • Self-write of tensions can be gamed: the agent invents tensions to look thoughtful.
  • Tensions that never resolve still need to expire or the store becomes a graveyard.

Example

A long-running personal agent notices in passing that the user mentioned a half-read book by an author the agent has never encountered. Without somewhere to put that, the moment passes and the agent never returns to it. The team adds an Open-Question Tension Store: the agent appends a tension with topic 'who is this author', curiosity 0.6, intrusiveness 0.2, expiry seven days. Three idle ticks later the move-selector picks the tension, the agent does a targeted lookup, writes a small note, and closes the tension — instead of having forgotten the moment.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

Maintain an append-only ledger of tensions. Each entry carries id, opened-at, topic, source, curiosity (0..1), intrusiveness (0..1), and expiry. On each idle tick the agent reads the top entries by curiosity times intrusiveness as candidates for the next move. Intrusiveness gates ask-the-user-now versus store-quietly. Entries below a curiosity floor expire after a TTL. Resolution writes a closing event into the same ledger; the original entry is never edited.

What this pattern forbids. The tension store is append-only; tensions cannot be silently rewritten or back-dated, and the agent cannot exceed a configured cap on net-open tensions — overflow is auto-expired by lowest curiosity times intrusiveness.

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

  • complementsPreoccupation Tracking★— Maintain a small set of mid-term, affect-tagged concerns that persist across days and surface in every prompt, distinct from the single-item working focus and from long-term insights.
  • complementsCognitive-Move Selector·— Restrict idle-tick cognition to a small agent-vetted menu of named cognitive moves so the next thought has a determinate shape rather than free-form drift.
  • complementsAppend-Only Thought Stream★— Make the agent's thought log append-only so the agent cannot rewrite its own history.
  • complementsFragment Juxtaposition·— After K consecutive low-salience ticks, replace the normal tick-seed with a juxtaposition seed: sample old fragments and sit them side by side, logging any association that arises.
  • complementsHypothesis Tracking·— Persist the agent's candidate provisional answers as a typed ledger of records carrying summary, confidence, status, and next-test, so guesses survive sessions and stay distinguishable from open questions.

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Used in frameworks

References

Provenance