Agent planning system review

Agent Planning System Review

Produce an Agent Planning and Control Contract for a reusable autonomous system. Read references/planning-and-control-methods.md before selecting a planning family.

Method

1. Define the environment: objective, observable state, available actions, hard constraints, uncertainty, reversibility, effect authority, and cost of delay or failure.
2. Separate goal selection, plan construction, action selection, execution, observation, and replanning. Name the owner of each transition.
3. Choose the least complex planning family that satisfies the environment: reactive interleaving, plan-and-execute, hierarchical decomposition, partial-order planning, deliberative intention management, or a hybrid.
4. Define plan state explicitly: goals, preconditions, effects, dependencies, causal links, invariants, resource bounds, commitments, and uncertainty.
5. Bind every action to an observation and outcome check. Never infer success merely because an action or tool call returned.
6. Specify invalidation and replan triggers: changed world state, failed precondition, blocked dependency, contradictory observation, budget breach, new higher-value work, or irreversible-effect boundary.
7. Bound search and deliberation by value of information, time, compute, branching, and risk. Define when to act, replan, escalate, degrade, or stop.
8. Test with nominal traces, stale-plan races, partial failure, conflicting goals, unavailable tools, deceptive success signals, and non-terminating loops.

Output

Create an Agent Planning and Control Contract with:

• objective, state model, action model, and operating assumptions;
• selected planning family and rejected alternatives;
• goal, intention, hierarchy, dependency, and resource semantics;
• observation-action-verification loop;
• plan validity, commitment, cancellation, and replanning rules;
• search, time, token, cost, and effect budgets;
• progress, deadlock, oscillation, and stop predicates;
• escalation and safe-effect boundaries; and
• executable scenarios, traces, simulations, or properties used as evidence.

Design rules

• Prefer causal and dependency structure over a brittle total sequence when independent actions may run in parallel.
• Use hierarchy to encode meaningful reusable task structure, not to hide an unbounded chain of prompts.
• Commit only while the intention remains justified; neither replan on every observation nor follow a stale plan blindly.
• Use receding-horizon control when distant state is uncertain: execute a bounded prefix, observe, and solve again.
• Treat ReAct-style reasoning and action interleaving as an execution pattern, not proof that the resulting plan is valid or complete.
• Do not add an optimizer, planner, or coordinator when a deterministic state machine or direct procedure is sufficient.

Boundaries

• Use autonomous-execution-standard to run and reschedule the current task portfolio; this skill designs the reusable planning mechanism itself.
• Use work-coordination-standard for portable claim, lease, handoff, and shared-ledger semantics; use the matching product adapter for live state.
• Use agent-context-engineering for context assembly and memory lifecycle.
• Use decision-optimization-modeling when the primary artifact is a constrained allocation, routing, scheduling, or capacity model rather than the agent's reusable planning and control mechanism.
• Use convergent-review for final review closure of an exact implementation.