Plutonic Rainbows

When Claude Asks Too Often

January 07, 2026 · uneasy.in/003eb7e

I spend a lot of time with Claude Code, and one feature has gradually become both useful and slightly irritating: the AskUserQuestionTool. This is the mechanism Claude uses to present structured multiple-choice questions during a workflow rather than simply guessing at my intent or asking open-ended questions. The first time I encountered it, the format surprised me. Instead of a conversational "what would you prefer?" I received a neat set of labelled options with descriptions, presented almost like a form. It felt deliberate, considered, and — at first — refreshingly different from the usual AI habit of making assumptions and hoping for the best.

My primary frustration with most AI assistants has always been their tendency to guess. They infer intent from insufficient context, make choices I would not have made, and occasionally barrel ahead with confidence that proves misplaced. The AskUserQuestionTool addresses this directly by creating explicit decision points. Instead of guessing which authentication method I want or which file structure I prefer, Claude can pause and ask. In theory, this solves a genuine problem. In practice, the execution reveals some interesting tensions.

The structured format — multiple-choice options with short descriptions — works well for scanning. I can quickly read through three or four possibilities and select one without much cognitive effort. When Claude batches several questions together, I find this efficient rather than overwhelming. Answering four related questions at once feels faster than a drawn-out back-and-forth. The visual presentation is clean: chips or buttons with explanatory text beneath each option, easy to parse at a glance.

However, the structure sometimes constrains rather than clarifies. I frequently want to say "yes, but" or "partially" or "this one, with modifications." The options presented rarely accommodate nuance. I find myself reaching for the "Other" option — which is always available as an escape hatch — more often than I would expect. If a well-designed set of choices should cover most cases, my frequent use of "Other" suggests the options are missing something. Usually what's missing is the ability to express conditional agreement or partial preference. Real decisions rarely fit into clean boxes.

The more significant issue is when questions feel like deflection rather than genuine inquiry. This happens frequently enough to be noticeable. Claude will ask me to choose between approaches when the context already contains enough information to make a reasonable decision. The question functions less as clarification and more as responsibility transfer — a way of ensuring that any suboptimal outcome traces back to my explicit choice rather than Claude's autonomous judgment. I understand the impulse. An AI that makes wrong decisions faces criticism; an AI that confirms decisions with the user has cover. Yet this creates a different problem: workflow interruption for questions that should not need asking.

The distinction between asking for permission and asking for preference matters here. "Should I proceed with the refactor?" is a permission question — it concerns whether to act at all. "Which naming convention do you prefer?" is a preference question — it concerns how to act when action is already implied. The tool handles this distinction reasonably well in most cases. The frustration arises when neither type of question is truly necessary. When Claude has enough context to make a confident choice, asking anyway feels like excessive caution rather than genuine collaboration.

I think the ideal balance involves asking rarely — reserving questions for high-stakes decisions or genuinely ambiguous situations where my input changes the outcome meaningfully. Routine choices, standard patterns, and situations where one option is clearly better should not require my intervention. The tool should be a mechanism for handling genuine uncertainty, not a crutch for avoiding autonomous decision-making. When I provide clear instructions, Claude should trust those instructions and act. When ambiguity genuinely exists, the structured question format serves its purpose well.

The AskUserQuestionTool represents a thoughtful attempt to solve a real problem in human-AI collaboration. Guessing creates friction; asking creates alignment. The structured format makes responses easier to provide and process. The batching capability respects my time by grouping related decisions. The "Other" option ensures I am never truly trapped by inadequate choices. These are genuine design strengths that improve the interaction compared to either pure autonomy or open-ended questioning.

At the same time, the tool highlights a broader tension in agentic AI design. How much autonomy should an agent exercise? When does asking become a form of hesitation? How do we distinguish useful checkpoints from unnecessary interruptions? The answer likely varies by user — some want more confirmation, some want less. The current implementation errs toward asking, which frustrates users like me who prefer agents that act decisively within clear parameters. Others might find the frequent checkpoints reassuring.

What I want from the tool is not its elimination but its refinement. Ask me about architectural decisions that will be difficult to reverse. Ask me about preferences that genuinely vary between users. Do not ask me about standard practices, obvious patterns, or decisions where one option is clearly superior. Do not use questions as a hedge against criticism. Trust the context I have provided, and reserve questions for moments when my input genuinely matters.

The AskUserQuestionTool is good infrastructure applied with imperfect judgment. The mechanism itself works. The challenge lies in knowing when to invoke it. Getting that balance right — asking enough to avoid bad guesses, but not so much that the agent feels hesitant — remains an unsolved problem. For now, I appreciate the tool while wishing it appeared less often.

Chanel Allure Homme Sport Superleggera

January 06, 2026 · uneasy.in/b1fb003

This limited edition fragrance is now thankfully back for good. I am very pleased. When I first wrote about Superleggera in October 2024, I could not understand how they could create what is maybe the best sport allure in the line and discontinue it so quickly.

When Memories Slip Their Anchors

January 05, 2026 · uneasy.in/6ff5501

I have noticed something unsettling about certain memories and objects. They no longer feel like parts of my past. They feel like presences — autonomous things that exist on their own terms, untethered from the timeline that should contain them. A particular room from childhood. A voice I cannot place. An object that carries weight I cannot explain. These fragments persist, but they have lost their coordinates. They no longer answer the question of when or why. They simply are.

For years I assumed this was a personal quirk, some failure of my own memory system. However, I have come to understand that this experience reflects something fundamental about how memory and meaning actually work. Time, it turns out, does not organise experience as reliably as I once believed. When the links between when, what, and why begin to weaken, memories detach from their original context and start to feel like independent entities rather than points on a timeline.

The first thing I had to accept is that memory does not function as an archive. Every recollection is a reconstruction assembled from fragments — sensory traces, emotional states, narrative expectations, present concerns. When I recall something repeatedly, its temporal anchor degrades faster than its emotional or symbolic content. The when fades while the what remains. As a result, a memory can lose its precise date or sequence while retaining extraordinary vividness. It becomes untethered from time, and that is the first step toward autonomy.

Physical objects compound this effect. Objects persist; contexts do not. I own things that have outlived every situation that once gave them meaning. They remain materially unchanged, carrying residual associations, but the social and emotional framework that originally fixed their significance has disappeared entirely. The object becomes a free-floating signifier — present, but no longer explained by its origin. This is why certain possessions feel haunted rather than merely old. They carry weight without carrying explanation.

Emotion makes this worse. Strong emotional encoding preserves intensity and atmosphere but does not reliably preserve sequence. I have memories that feel immediate rather than past, concurrent with the present, resistant to being placed in any particular year or period. When this happens, the memory is no longer something that happened. It becomes something that exists. The distinction matters enormously. A memory that happened belongs to the past and can be filed away accordingly. A memory that exists refuses that categorisation. It remains active, present, unfinished.

I normally domesticate memory through narrative. I tell myself that this happened, then this, therefore that. Narrative provides explanatory scaffolding that keeps fragments in their proper places. However, narrative coherence weakens over time — through loss, through trauma, through long temporal distance, or simply through the accumulation of years. When the scaffolding fails, what remains are isolated fragments: a room, a voice, a smell, an object. Without narrative containment, these fragments assert themselves independently. They no longer wait to be summoned. They arrive unbidden, carrying their own atmosphere.

Additionally, every act of remembering is also an act of reinterpretation. As my present self changes, old memories acquire new meanings. Objects get re-read symbolically. Past moments are recruited to explain current preoccupations. At that point, the memory is no longer about the past at all. It becomes active material in present thought, which reinforces its sense of autonomy. The memory is not sitting in storage waiting to be retrieved. It is doing work, shaping how I understand myself right now.

Cultural acceleration worsens all of this. Environments disappear quickly. Media formats vanish. Social rhythms change at speeds that would have been incomprehensible to previous generations. This leaves behind what I can only call orphaned memories — experiences tied to worlds that no longer exist. Without a living context to anchor them, these memories cannot reattach themselves to time. They persist instead as atmospheric residues, hanging in consciousness without coordinates.

I should be clear: memories and objects are not actually autonomous. They feel that way because temporal markers have eroded, causal explanations are gone, and emotional charge remains intact. The mind interprets persistence without explanation as independence. This is a perception, not a literal property. However, the perception has real effects. It shapes how I experience my own past and how I relate to objects that have survived their contexts.

What I am describing comes down to a simple principle: when time fails to organise experience, meaning reorganises itself. And meaning does not require chronology to survive. A memory can lose its date and retain its significance. An object can outlive its purpose and gain symbolic weight it never had when it was merely useful. The emotional and symbolic dimensions of experience are more durable than the temporal ones. They persist after the scaffolding collapses.

This troubles me because autonomous memories and objects refuse closure. They resist categorisation. They undermine the linear identity I try to maintain — the story where I was one person, then became another, progressing through time in an orderly sequence. These fragments suggest something else: that the past is not finished, that time is not a clean arrow but a loose arrangement of survivals. Some things refuse to stay where I put them. They keep arriving in the present, carrying atmospheres I cannot explain and weights I cannot discharge.

I do not know how to resolve this. I suspect resolution is not available. The conditions that produce autonomous memories — the reconstructive nature of recall, the persistence of objects beyond their contexts, the durability of emotion over chronology — are not bugs in the system. They are how memory and meaning actually work. I can acknowledge this without being able to change it.

Therefore, I have stopped trying to force these fragments back into their proper places on the timeline. I let them exist as what they are: presences without explanation, survivals from contexts that no longer exist. The room from childhood remains vivid. The voice remains unplaceable. The objects continue to carry weight. They are not history. They are something else — something that persists after time has done its work and failed to organise what remains.