Comment by _bobm

So planning is tied to the spec. This much is clear.

What the author I think is hinting at is not planning alone but "the development and evolution of any program and the state of this program throughout the planning, elaboration, and eventual runtime".

I chuckle at the thought that throwing an md file or a prompt at this problem is sufficient.

So, I posit that if we want any agentic code to evolve meaningfully in the short future and over the long run, we have to have a system which holds and presents this information, the state of a program, in a coherent manner to a human operator. No other way. No other way. And this I say to both nay and yay sayers.

You can argue also that this is part of an even bigger thing. But it is not part of the current discussion on planning and speccing in agentic systems.

OpenAI and anthropic can throw all the billions they don't have at this and adjacent issues, but if this is not solved then they don't have anything.