None of them have been worth it. A year ago the models needed to be reminded. Today they can follow a plan from text alone. This is my experience from working on a project alone - in teams ... i actually think the same lesson holds in the new AI paradigm.

My current scheme is basically this - in order of the task's complexity:

- Tell an agent to do something

- Tell an agent to make a plan then tell it to execute on it.

- Tell an agent to make a plan, write to a file, have a subagent review it, then execute it.

- Do the above, but instead tell the agent they're in a supervise mode and to have subagents implement as many phases and rollover with a handoff.md while they, as the supervisor agent, keeps driving the task to completion.

The latter two i have under a sigil so they're prepared prompts i can inject with a few keystrokes.

If i feel very fancy i'll tell them to update the plan with a checklist and add checkboxes, but it just doesn't pay enough to have 'init-prompt' level planning feature or tools if in the same context you already have files/read/write.

This blog is on medium so I guess the migration went sideways!

Joke aside, nice series of tutorials, don't let the haters get to you. I think with the current token panic it might get handy soon

For example, if I were building real software, I would design everything from policy to error logging policies and so on. But when writing a blog post, it's just simplified into a short runnable script.

Similar question with the to-do list. Do they actually help task completion? Is there any research on that? I think they're less helpful with more recent models, but maybe they still help with smaller ones?

The system prompt asking it to make a plan before starting work does sound helpful though. (Of course it would also be great to see numbers there :)

Please stop posting.