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Disambiguate with user if task is unclear - Duo Workflow

Problem

Duo Workflow doesn't attempt to clarify ambiguous tasks with the user, which often leads to irrelevant plans or actions.

Before they start a workflow (and in the docs), we encourage users to be detailed with a clear definition of done. But the level of detail and clarity that Duo needs to perform correctly is subjective and challenging to communicate prior to actually handing over the task to it.

Goal

To increase the likelihood of Workflow success and to de-risk the user factor- meaning the proficiency that a user have with prompting Agentic systems. We need to ensure that the task creation experience optimizes to extract the needed information from the user, so we can construct a coherent detailed input to provide the Agent graph with.

Proposed Solution

We've agreed that we want to add a "disambiguation/questioning" capability before the plan is accepted, where Duo Workflow should ask for relevant information to finish it's plan, if it cannot find that information otherwise. Examples for prompts/cases where this would be happening should be collected in #196 (comment 2339595834).

Potential Flow

  1. User provides a task.
  2. DW gathers context
  3. DW evaluates whether the given task is possible with the given context.
  4. DW detects that it cannot understand the task well enough to create a plan — checks task clarity.
  5. User receives a disambiguation question from DW.
  6. When the user replies, DW evaluates again whether the given task is possible with the given context.
  7. DW analyzes the task to create a plan.
  8. Execution pauses.
  9. Only when the task is well understood by DW, does it go into the context building stage.

Task clarity checks

These are potential checks, ideas to investigate, and explore:

  • Readable
  • Has definition of done
  • Includes any specific information needed

Related

This is related to Auto-Pause Duo Workflow before starting execution (#109 - closed), but the difference is that that issue is about the user approving the plan, whereas this issue is about Duo seeking clarification to be able to create a plan.

Edited by Sebastian Rehm