codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Default Mode needs a safe structured-question path for critical execution decisions [2 comments, 3 participants]

Summary

Default Mode should have a safe structured-question path for critical decisions discovered during execution.

This is not a request to turn Default Mode into Plan Mode. It is a request for a narrow, safe interaction primitive that lets the agent ask the user to choose between concrete options when continuing without clarification would likely send the implementation in the wrong direction.

Current behavior

request_user_input is available in Plan Mode, but not generally available in Default Mode.

During implementation, the agent can discover decision points that were not knowable before it started reading or changing the codebase. Examples:

• two incompatible API shapes are both plausible
• a migration could be backward-compatible or a hard cut
• a UI workflow could preserve old behavior or intentionally remove it
• a security-sensitive default cannot be inferred from the repo
• a test strategy depends on a product-level acceptance choice

In Default Mode, the agent can ask a normal text question, but that has weaker UX and weaker semantics than a structured question. The model may also continue with an assumption instead of stopping for the decision.

Expected behavior

Default Mode should support a constrained structured-question path for execution-time clarification.

The safe subset could have restrictions such as:

• no file edits while waiting for the answer
• no permission escalation
• no hidden auto-default unless explicitly configured
• 2-3 concrete options plus an optional free-form answer
• answer is injected back into the active turn/session as a first-class user decision

Example flow:

Agent is implementing.
Agent discovers two incompatible public API designs.
Agent asks a structured question with clear tradeoffs.
User selects one.
Agent continues implementation using that answer.

This would let Default Mode remain execution-capable while still avoiding irreversible guesses.

Why this matters

For large engineering tasks, important decisions often emerge only after the agent has inspected the real code. If the only structured clarification tool is tied to Plan Mode, then Default Mode has a gap exactly when the agent is doing the deepest work.

Without a structured stop-and-confirm path, the agent may either:

• guess and continue down the wrong implementation path
• ask an unstructured text question that is easy to miss or answer ambiguously
• produce a brittle plan/execution boundary where the user has to restart in Plan Mode

Related issues

Related but broader:

• #23041: allow request_user_input in Default Mode for interview-style document workflows
• #23164: Plan Mode can fail to call the question asking tool despite needing answers
• #18611: improve Plan Mode decision prompts

This issue is narrower than #23041: it focuses on execution-time critical decisions in Default Mode, not interview-style authoring workflows.