The Task Is Larger Than the Prompt: What Agents Miss Before They Act
TL;DR for operators A tool-using agent can complete the action a user requested and still produce the wrong operational outcome. The missing requirement may be recoverable from current device state, a temporary preference, an accessibility setting, a privacy boundary, or the reversibility of the requested change. Implicit Intelligence – Evaluating Agents on What Users Don’t Say1 tests this problem directly. Across 205 deliberately challenging scenarios, the strongest evaluated model, GPT-5.2-pro, achieves a 48.3% Scenario Pass Rate: fewer than half of scenarios satisfy every required criterion. Its mean Normalized Scenario Score is higher, at 72.7%, showing that agents often complete substantial parts of the task while still missing at least one consequential requirement. ...