# Open-Question Tension Store

> Persist unresolved questions as a typed ledger with curiosity and intrusiveness scores — so they drive the agent's next inquiry instead of dissolving when the prompt ends.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Cognition & Introspection
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/open_question_tension_store/

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## Description
**Intent**: An agent that only responds to prompts never closes the loop on things it noticed but couldn't pursue. A tension store gives open questions a home and a re-entry path.

**Context**: The agent notices things it doesn't fully understand in every conversation: an unfamiliar name, an inconsistency in what the user said, a thread dropped that seems worth revisiting. Without a store, these dissolve at turn end and never return — even if the agent would have acted on them given a quiet tick.

**Solution**: 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, read the top entries by curiosity × 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.



## Use Cases
- The agent should initiate inquiry on idle ticks, not only respond to explicit prompts.
- Unresolved questions currently vanish at turn end and never return organically.
- There is an idle-tick body that can read top-ranked tensions and act on one.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Open questions survive across turns and sessions without manual tracking

- Curiosity × intrusiveness scoring makes the next move defensible rather than stochastic

- Expiry plus a cap prevents the store from becoming a question graveyard




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Score weights are opinionated — bad calibration suppresses real curiosity

- Self-write of tensions invites gaming unless the agent's training discourages it

- Ledger growth is real even with expiry; archive paths must be planned from the start







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/open-question-tension-store/)