The fastest way to corrupt money is an agent-built payment system.
Not all code is equally expensive to get wrong. Stop reviewing your agent's output uniformly and spend your scrutiny where a mistake double-charges a customer.
#plan-mode
10 posts tagged #plan-mode.
Your Reasoning Model Should Never Read Grep Output
Subagents are sold as parallelism. The real win is context hygiene plus model arbitrage: cheap explorers read, and your expensive model sees only findings.
Bootstrap a service you don't understand and you ship a black box.
Vibe-coding a service you have never touched traps you at the first failure. Point the agent at its docs over MCP and force it to teach you back.
An Agent Gets Worse Long Before Its Context Window Fills Up
Stop fighting the context limit with a bigger window. Write an exhaustive plan to a file, then relay fresh sessions that each tick off items until it ships.
A Second Opinion It Didn't Write
An agent reviewing its own plan shares its blind spots. Wire a different vendor's model in as a gate, and a fail verdict re-engages planning before any code.
By the time you review the diff, the destructive call already ran.
Reviewing irreversible actions after the fact is too late. Split tools by reversibility, force a plan, and gate the destructive step behind a human interrupt.
Destination and Journey
Hand the agent two committed documents - a requirements doc that fixes the destination, a phased plan that fixes the journey - and a big feature still ships.
Flat agent swarms demo beautifully and ship terribly.
Let peer agents talk freely and a query hot-potatoes between them while your bill climbs. Route everything through one orchestrator with a turn cap instead.
The planning step's value isn't the document. It's the interrogation.
Your judgment lives in your head until something extracts it. A procedure that explores the repo, then grills you branch by branch, turns an idea into a spec.
The Relay, Not the Window
A million-token window won't fix a long build. Externalize state to a plan file and relay across fresh sessions - quality dies long before the window fills.