Planning Patterns

Planning patterns address how agents decompose complex goals into sequences of concrete steps before executing them, rather than reacting one action at a time without foresight. When an agent executes without a plan, it makes locally optimal decisions that are globally incoherent: it writes a function that solves step 3 before understanding what step 5 requires, producing work that must be thrown away when the later constraint surfaces. Approaches range from plan-then-execute (generate a full plan upfront, then follow it) to iterative replanning (adjust the plan after each step based on results) to hierarchical planning (decompose into subgoals, then subgoals into tasks); the best production systems combine upfront planning with the flexibility to replan mid-task, because static plans go stale the moment an early step produces an unexpected result.