DEV Community

Joey 、
Joey 、

Posted on • Originally published at github.com

Your agent asked a question and froze the queue for 10 min — how do you all handle ask_user_question?

#deepseek #agents #ai #productivity

Your agent casually asked a question and froze the queue for 10 minutes — how do you all handle ask_user_question?

A real pain point. I'll share my solution and the traps I hit, but I really want to hear how the community actually deals with it.

Quick one for everyone: do your agents randomly stop to ask you questions? And what happens to the running task when they do?

Here's what happened to me: DeepSeek Harness's agent calls ask_user_question mid-task — "should this module be sync or async?" "OK to run this high-risk command?" Sounds reasonable. But it deadlocked my entire task queue for 10 minutes.

The problem: a question = a silent deadlock

The worst part: it doesn't error. The task just hangs there, pending keeps climbing, you think it's thinking — but it's actually waiting for a human answer that will never come. Because the question goes through the question channel (question/requested), which is completely separate from the approval channel (approval/requested).

My first relay only listened to approvals, so:

Agent stops on the computer, waiting for a user
      ↓
question-channel messages silently dropped by my relay
      ↓
phone has no idea
      ↓
task hangs forever until timeout
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

It took me two days to realize: it wasn't DSH hanging — the question just never reached a human.

My fix: turn questions into "your answer needed" cards

While building DeepSeek Phone Harness (remote-control your desktop agent from your phone), I made questions a card that drops right into the message stream:

  • Agent asks → phone shows "your answer needed" card
  • Pick an option / type a custom answer / skip
  • Answer it and the task continues; ignore it and it waits

Protocol has to match the official Web GUI exactly ({ok:true, value:{sessionId, answer:{answers:[{id, selected}]}}}), or DSH won't accept it.

What I'd really like to hear

My fix only handles the "phone side." I want the broader community's practice:

  1. Do you let agents ask you questions at all, or disable ask_user_question?
  2. Granularity: which questions are worth interrupting a human for, and which should the agent just decide?
  3. Async handling: when a question blocks a task, what does your queue do — block, skip, or run around it?
  4. Has anyone set a "question budget" per task, or use an alternative tool?

Honestly my current stance is conservative (ask only if it must, always interrupt). But I suspect that's not optimal — "when to interrupt a human" is probably the deeper question than "how to interrupt."

Would love to hear your practices below. And if you've had an agent-question deadlock too, drop a comment so I can gauge how common this actually is.

Implementation is open source (MIT): https://github.com/2903077918-lgtm/DeepSeek-phone-harness

Top comments (0)