Working by Task Type7 minLesson 15 of 60
Planning Before You Build
The cheapest place to fix a mistake is in the plan. Before any non-trivial change, get the agent to lay out its approach and review it. You are trading one minute of reading for an hour of un-doing the wrong thing.
A good plan request
plan prompt
Do not write code yet. Read the relevant files and give me:
1. What you understand the task to be.
2. The files you will change and why.
3. The risks or unknowns.
Then wait for my go-ahead.Watch for the wrong frame
The most valuable thing in a plan is spotting that the agent misunderstood the task. Fixing the frame is one sentence now or a rewrite later.
Anthropic's research on building effective agents makes a related point: the best results come from simple, composable patterns and clear control, not from elaborate machinery. Planning is the simplest such pattern.
Building effective agents (Anthropic)Anthropic's first-party guide to simple, reliable agent patterns.anthropic.com