Planning and Multi-Step Coding Tasks
Fixing a typo is one tool call; implementing a feature across a dozen files, with new tests and a migration, is a project. As coding tasks grow, a coding agent needs more than a tight edit-run loop — it needs to plan, decompose, track progress, and manage its own context over a long effort. This post is about how coding agents handle big, multi-step tasks, and why planning and decomposition are what let them tackle real work rather than just small edits.
Fixing a typo is one tool call; implementing a feature is a project. How coding agents handle big tasks: decompose into ordered subtasks, plan before acting, track progress, and manage context over a long effort — a hierarchical plan-plus-loop structure that scales from edits to real engineering, and benefits hugely from human direction.