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I like to actually have hierarchical plans.

Start with the big idea. Pin down the product manager-level description, and maybe some details about which features are in or out, how the phased design/roadmap will work, maybe what the basic tech stack will be.

That document gets saved, and has the big picture context.

Next, we go a little deeper, flesh out schemas, APIs, a little more about what the code should look like, the overall testing strategy. This document gets saved, and the AI can reference it for context.

The next level is a very specific implementation plan. Think individual small JIRA tickets in an epic. The AI writes this based on previous context. I make sure each individual step has very explicit instructions about branch names, which branch is branched from where, the testing and documentation that will be done for that step. It should be obvious from the higher level documents, but that helps keep the AI to only worrying about the local document in its context window.

Then have a DAG of stacked pull requests designed for subagents to work through.

All of this keeps the context window down (as well as costs down, and accuracy up) and works super well, and I can get a tremendous amount of code that is easy to review through stacked PRs. Invariably I will want to fix earlier ones then percolate that down the stack, so I have some skills for that.

by spike0211 days ago|

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I try to do similar. I'll even break down parts of the plan into separate docs and have it solely refer to them one by one as needed with /clear between. It's a more manual process but not the worst. I could probably even whip up some kind of skill to automate it somewhat with subagents or similar.

by jmalicki1 days ago|

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You can just tell your main agents "I have these implementation docs in <DIRECTORY>, please spawn parallel subagents to implement all of them" and I generally find that works, and what's great is it's in parallel too so takes less wall clock time (even if there is slight token duplication from having the main agent and the subagent both read the prompt/doc, but overall I think it is less usage of tokens unless you go crazy with /clear).

by Sammi1 days ago|

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So far I have three different folders in my project for three different types of md documents that I keep creating and revising together with the agent: reports, plans, and reviews

Every large feature has at least one of each file created for it in that order. I start by analysing stuff and making reports that might also contain design thinking and decisions. Once I'm satisfied we have properly analysed and thought though whatever it is we're working on then I might make a plan or just jump into implementation depending on how complex the issue is. And then I might have zero or multiple reviews of different kinds by different agents depending on how much verification I think the issue warrants.

This is my super simple worse-is-better development process. I make up what is needed on the spot.

by tekacs1 days ago|

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I have these plan files as well, but it depends on the scope and scale of the things you're executing on, I think. However much detail gets put into the plan, it still doesn't help if part of what the model needs to understand is the fine-grained / perfect detail of a large surface area.

by skybrian1 days ago|

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That sounds more monolithic than modular, but I guess some projects don’t decompose easily? Or maybe they do, but getting there is the goal.

by BoorishBears16 hours ago|

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I've found if you pay close attention, models in Codex get briefly lost on where it is in the plan post-compaction. If it was in the middle of a test it often tries to resume the test from the start, or will seem "surprised" that past steps are completed already.

It's hard to believe that sort of confusion doesn't hurt performance a bit, the question is if that degradation is worse than the performance fall off from long-context (which is highly task specific)

by astroscout1 days ago|

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