Last post I said the planning turned out harder and more interesting than the doing. This is me paying that off.
Quick recap so this stands on its own. I build a CLI where you type a sentence and an LLM picks one action out of hundreds of apps and runs it on your real accounts. Last post was about direct mode, the get-out-of-my-way mode, and the two things it has to get right every time: which action, and which account. This post is about the other mode. Plan mode. The one that's supposed to be the careful, safe one where the agent shows you what it's going to do before it does it.
I figured plan mode would be the easy half. You don't even execute anything, you just write down the steps. How hard can writing down steps be. It turned out to be most of the months.
What plan mode is
By default you're in direct mode, and the composer tells you so. There's a little control sitting right there, and if you want to flip to plan mode you click it. That's the whole trigger. The agent never sniffs your request and decides on its own that this one feels risky, because that would be unpredictable and you'd never know which mode you were in. It's your call, every time.
