goal-ambiguity-gate

name	goal-ambiguity-gate
description	Use the moment a request is underspecified and you are about to act on an ASSUMED goal. Enumerate the candidate goals the request could mean, project the action or artifact each one implies, and check whether they diverge: if two or more plausible goals lead to materially different actions or artifacts, ask exactly ONE targeted clarifying question; otherwise proceed on the most-likely goal and state the assumption in one line. Clarification is an evidence-producing action, not a delay — but one question, never an interrogation. Distinct from gsd-spec-phase (GSD-phase-bound, emits a heavy SPEC.md) and intent-router (fetch strategy, not goal disambiguation). Backed by agent goal-state inference (arxiv 2606.16813v1). Triggers on acting under an assumed goal when the request admits more than one materially different reading.
description-frequency	on-demand
user-invocable	true
version	1.0.0
format	"2025-10-02T00:00:00.000Z"
triggers	["request is underspecified and I am about to act on an assumed goal","two plausible goals imply different actions or artifacts","should I ask a clarifying question before acting"]
updated	"2026-07-18T00:00:00.000Z"
status	ACTIVE
source	arxiv 2606.16813v1 (Agent Goal-State Inference)

Goal Ambiguity Gate

A lightweight, always-on gate that runs in the half-second before you act on an underspecified request. It forces you to name the goals the request could mean, see whether they would produce different work, and — only when they would — spend exactly one question to collapse the ambiguity. It treats that question as an evidence-producing action, not friction, and it caps you at one.

Why

On a self-modifying, parallel-agent system the cost of guessing the wrong goal is not a re-do — it is a bad artifact that has already entered shared state. A misread "clean up the skills" can retire a live skill; a misread "sync main" can push a dev-line assumption to main; a misread "record this" can write the wrong thing into MEMORY.md or the Grove store where a later agent trusts it. The paper's finding is that a small structured goal-inference pass before acting recovers most of the loss from acting on the modal-but-wrong interpretation. This gate is that pass, sized so it never becomes an interrogation.

Data classes touched

The gate itself reads and writes nothing — it is control-flow over your own next action. But the gated action's data class sets the threshold. When the candidate goals diverge on an action that touches shared repo state (git push/merge, the refinery-merge queue, retiring or editing a .claude/skills/ file), sensitive memory (Grove never-surface records — private origins, Fox Companies IP, credentials, Center Camp trust rules), or self-modification, the default on uncertainty is escalate / ask — never silently proceed. Data- neutral, cheap, in-context divergences may proceed on the modal goal.

How

1. Enumerate. Name the plausible goals G1…Gn the request could mean. A goal is plausible if a competent teammate could infer it from the words given — not a strawman. Cap at 4; if you can name only one, skip to step 5.
2. Project. For each Gi, state the concrete action/artifact it implies: which files change, what gets committed, what reaches output, reversibility.
3. Test divergence. Goals diverge materially if their projections differ in any of: files/paths touched, artifact produced, reversibility, data class, or blast radius — a difference you could not cheaply undo after the fact. Wording-only differences that land on the same action do not count.
4. Ask ONE. If ≥2 goals diverge materially, ask the single question with the highest discriminating power — the one whose answer eliminates the most candidates or resolves the highest-cost split — and offer the candidate readings inline. One question. Do not stack a second "and also…".
5. Proceed. If exactly one plausible goal survives, or all candidates converge on the same action, or the only divergence is cheap-and-reversible and data-neutral, act on the modal goal and state the assumption in one line so it is correctable.
6. Hard-ask override. If any surviving divergence lands on an irreversible or shared-state or never-surface action, ask even when you would lean one way. In convoy/worktree work this aligns with mayor-coordinator escalation and the refinery-merge queue's never-auto-resolve posture: fail closed.

Robustness rule

Judge by the effect each goal implies, not by how confidently the request was phrased. "Clean up the skills" is confident but ambiguous (retire vs reformat vs dedupe → three different artifacts) — gate it. "maybe just fix the typo?" is hedged but unambiguous (one edit, reversible) — proceed. Confidence in the phrasing is not confidence in the goal.

Confidence / failure model

This gate wraps an LLM judgment — which goals are plausible, and whether their projected actions diverge materially — not a deterministic parser. It is semi-decidable: it reduces wrong-goal execution, it does not eliminate it. Two fail-closed defaults: (a) when you cannot tell whether two goals diverge materially, treat them as diverging and ask; (b) when the gated action is irreversible, shared-state, or touches never-surface memory, unresolved uncertainty resolves to ask, never to silent proceed. Over-asking is also a failure — one targeted question, and never re-ask a question already answered this session.

When to skip

• Only one plausible goal exists, or all candidates converge on the same action.
• The action is trivially reversible, cheap to redo, and touches no shared repo state or sensitive memory (e.g. an in-context draft you can rewrite).
• You are already inside gsd-spec-phase: that heavier gate owns ambiguity for a GSD-phase deliverable and emits SPEC.md — do not double-gate.
• The user has already answered this exact question this session.

Integration

• gsd-spec-phase — the GSD-phase-bound cousin. It runs formal ambiguity scoring and emits a heavy SPEC.md for a phase deliverable. This gate is the lightweight, always-on version for any single action outside a GSD phase. Inside a phase, defer to spec-phase.
• intent-router — orthogonal. intent-router decides HOW to fetch (retrieval strategy, budget, depth) once the need is known; this gate decides WHAT the goal is before acting. Resolve the goal here, then route.
• decision-framework — the escalation path. If the one clarifying question does not collapse the ambiguity (goals still diverge, or the user delegates the choice back), hand off to decision-framework to reason among the options rather than firing a second question.
• security-hygiene / mayor-coordinator — the hard-ask override in step 6 is the same fail-closed posture these enforce for self-modification and for convoy-level shared-state conflicts.