I've tried most form of planning - from the basic AGENTS.md guide to keeping ./dev/ plan files, todo list tools, sqlite db with both minimal and extensive tracking, etc.

None of them have been worth it. A year ago the models needed to be reminded. Today they can follow a plan from text alone. This is my experience from working on a project alone - in teams ... i actually think the same lesson holds in the new AI paradigm.

My current scheme is basically this - in order of the task's complexity:

- Tell an agent to do something

- Tell an agent to make a plan then tell it to execute on it.

- Tell an agent to make a plan, write to a file, have a subagent review it, then execute it.

- Do the above, but instead tell the agent they're in a supervise mode and to have subagents implement as many phases and rollover with a handoff.md while they, as the supervisor agent, keeps driving the task to completion.

The latter two i have under a sigil so they're prepared prompts i can inject with a few keystrokes.

If i feel very fancy i'll tell them to update the plan with a checklist and add checkboxes, but it just doesn't pay enough to have 'init-prompt' level planning feature or tools if in the same context you already have files/read/write.

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syspec 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Did you read the article?

It's not about enhancing Claude. This article is about creating your own agent, and giving it the ability to create plans and tasks list for its or.

The way Claude code creates plans and tasks list for itself.

The article is about creating that in your own harness for things not using claude code, like say a custom LLM integration in your own web app.

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manishsharan an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Please don't take offense to this very dumb question:

Why can't you do the planning ? Figure out what needs to be done , break it down into small tasks and then ask the agent to execute those small tasks?

When we executed projects in the past, this is what I would do as a lead: figure out the overall software architecture and delegate the tasks to developers.

This way I always knew how the system worked and could extend it as needed. I am not in development role anymore but I am trying to understand why we are delegating planning and software architecture to coding agents?

	▲	nl an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The kinds of detailed (and excellent) plans Opus or Fable can generate on our large code base would take me maybe 1-2 days to work through and they do in 10-20 minutes. Maybe I spent 2-4 hours reviewing it, checking things with colleagues etc. Then I press "go" and maybe an hour later I have a tested system ready for manual review. It's plans are at least as good as any I've seen. Their weakness is if there are unstated assumptions I have about how things need to be done, so most of my time is now getting those assumptions stated properly and then reviewing. Why wouldn't I use this? It's the best tool I've used in my 30 years of professional programming.
	▲	panarky 25 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I could do the planning but I don't, for the same reason that I could write the source code but I don't, for the same reason that I could write the machine code but I don't.
	▲	nnnnico an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		whatever you delegated in the past probably also required planning by the engineer that went down and got it done, most planning done by agents is at this same level, agent explores the codebase, understands where to touch, tradeoffs, code-level architecture, and ask the user for more context or balance with assumptions and other patterns already present in code