Workflow
What is a plan for, when the code takes five minutes
The reasonable objection to planning AI work: the code takes five minutes, the plan takes longer, why bother. The objection assumes the plan exists to help write the code. It does not. It exists to judge the code.
Cheap code changed what plans are for
When code was expensive, a plan saved implementation time: think first, type once. Agents broke that economics. Implementation is now nearly free, which means the expensive part moved downstream: figuring out whether what got built is what you wanted, and what it quietly broke.
That question is unanswerable without a reference point. A diff by itself cannot be right or wrong. It can only be right or wrong against something, and the conversation you had with the agent two hours ago is not something. It is a memory, the agent's memory, and it gets worse every message.
What goes in the plan
In Nanostack, /nano writes the plan before the build phase starts, and it is deliberately short:
- planned_files: each file the change will touch, with one line on why.
- risks: what could go wrong, with severity. A payments webhook plan carries "signature must be verified before any state change" at high.
- out_of_scope: what was explicitly cut. Invoices, plan switching, proration. Written down so nobody builds them by accident.
Thirty seconds to read. But now three later phases have a contract: review compares files changed against files planned, security knows which risk to attack first, and QA knows what done means.
Scope drift becomes arithmetic
The most useful consequence: "the agent went off the rails" stops being a feeling. The review artifact says four files changed, four planned, zero out of scope, or it says seven changed, four planned, and lists the three extras. You decide what to do with the extras. The point is you get to decide, because the drift was caught by subtraction, not by vigilance.
Five minutes of code deserves thirty seconds of plan
That is the actual trade. Not waterfall, not a spec document: one JSON file, written by the agent itself, that turns every later check from an opinion into a comparison. The faster the code gets, the better this trade looks.