Prompt Engineering

Ask, or It Will Guess: Question-Asking Is the Core Skill of Agentic Work

Models almost never ask you what you meant: across ambiguous questions, answer rates run above 95% and clarification barely registers. Repairing that in conversation makes it worse: underspecified multi-turn runs measure a 39% average performance drop, driven by a 112% jump in unreliability, and the effect shows up from two turns onward. The leverage is no longer in writing better prompts. It is in forcing the questions out before the first answer attempt, and in asking the questions afterward that prove you understood what you shipped.