Agent Plan Review

Agent plan review

Reviewing a plan costs a minute; reviewing a wrong implementation costs an hour and a revert. Asking for the plan first is the highest-value habit in agent-assisted work.

Method

1. Ask for the plan before any edit. Files to change, the approach, and the order, so the direction can be corrected before effort is spent (see agent-plan-execute-replan).
2. Check it against your intent. Agents frequently solve a nearby problem correctly, and the plan is where that becomes visible.
3. Look for what is missing. Tests, migrations, error handling, and documentation are the usual omissions.
4. Challenge unnecessary scope. Plans that touch more than needed produce reviews that are hard to reason about (see pull-request-size).
5. Confirm the verification step. How the agent will know it worked, since a plan without a check ends in assumed success.
6. Approve explicitly and let it run. Once the plan is right, interrupting each step wastes the benefit of delegation.
7. Compare the result to the plan. Divergence is worth understanding, since it is either discovery or drift.

Boundaries

A good plan does not guarantee good implementation and must still be reviewed. Plan review adds a turn, which is not worth it for trivial changes. Agents can produce plausible plans for approaches that will not work, which needs your judgement.