For work with meaningful choices, start with a design conversation. Ask the agent to inspect the project, interview you, name the decisions that would change the solution, and propose a plan. Approve the approach before the first edit.
Skipping this conversation does not remove the decisions. It hides them in the implementation, where they are harder to see and more expensive to change. This is the same reason teams use design reviews and RFCs: changing a paragraph is cheaper than rebuilding a system.
Where this comes from: reviewing months of session logs, the pattern in the human’s interventions was consistent: they were surgical corrections at forks the agent had driven through without asking. The failure isn’t wrong answers; it’s unnamed questions (AF-15). Putting the fork-naming before the work is the structural fix.
What good looks like
- No edits during discovery. Use your agent’s plan mode if it has one, or say “do not edit until I approve the plan.”
- Open questions, one at a time. Interview-style beats a wall of multiple-choice the agent grades itself. You’ll say things the agent wouldn’t have offered as options.
- Forks named with a recommendation. The agent states each genuine fork, the plausible readings, and which it would pick and why, then waits. Especially for trigger conditions and state transitions, where an inferred condition is the classic silent wrong turn (AF-14).
- Approve a bounded plan. A plan for one feature gives the eventual diff a clear authority. A roadmap for everything does not.
Try it
Do it by hand
Next non-trivial task, open with:
- “Enter plan mode. Interview me about this, one open question at a time, until you can state the goal, the non-goals, and the forks. Then propose the plan and wait.”
And when an agent presents you options mid-work, notice it: that’s the pattern working. Answer the fork; don’t wave it through.
Try it with your agent
Before writing any code for this task, enter plan mode (if you have no
plan mode: make no edits yet). Interview me (one open question at a
time, no multiple-choice) until you can state: the goal in one
sentence, the non-goals, the constraint most likely to bite, and the
two or three genuine forks with your recommendation for each. Where a
trigger or gating condition is involved, restate the exact condition
and the plausible alternative readings, and make me pick. Then present
the plan and wait for approval before touching anything.Watch out
- The interview that answers itself: multiple-choice questions where the agent picks a default if you hesitate are forks driven through with extra steps. Insist on open questions.
- A plan that only restates the request: it has not exposed a decision. The tell of a real one is that it contains a decision you had to make.