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 para…
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 ext…
…but it’s than just that (in most cases; I am just lazy sometimes); but fundamentally there’s a limit to how much complexity people can comprehend.
We are good at working at high level abstractions, modules with clear apis that can be sprung to together into some kind of feature.
You don’t need to look inside the black box of the module if you trust the implementer; Ive never opened up the internals of a calendar be like “how does this work?”. I just don’t care. It’s a calendar. I use the api.
I think most people are using these tools in this way; very few people are having an agent write a plan, then a sub agent review it, no human in the loop. Those are for prototypes and are yolo cowboys using open claw and playing with the phones instead of working; we have a few at work, but their PRs are regularly rejected as slop.
…but, realistically; many people aren’t software architects. They may not even know coding patterns, forget architecture patterns.
Having an agent spit out generic software architecture is probably better than what they were producing before.
Writing a module / feature using generic architecture and planning is probably better than random code spaghetti right?
It’s easy to lament the loss of craft here, but at the end of the day, the models today do an ok job of this. The models of tomorrow will probably be better at it than many people.
Architecture is easy composed to actually implementing things. You just wave your hands from your ivory tower and say “more event sourcing”.