Why Does Claude Code Ask Before Coding?

Thariq Shihipar believes pretty much everyone needs the agent to pull out more requirements and collaborate, rather than being good enough to instruct the agent as it is. They have more ambiguity, and they know less than they think they know about the problem.

Ask User Question was the first time the model was good at elicitation. The skill showed up as an emergent behavior he wanted to test, drawing on a human computer interaction background from undergrad and grad school. The work is human agent interaction: the agent has to communicate with you and extract the requirements. As Claude Code has gone broader, everyone uses it in their own way, and the default behavior is very hard to change. A very good prompter sometimes just wants the work done. Someone who is not good at prompting needs the agent to clarify. The schema, the call stack, and the design details are the hard problems to settle before implementation. Figuring out unknowns will forever be a skill in agentic coding. Even if the model is super intelligent, it still needs to know what you want, and preferences still have to be pulled out.