Specs, plans, checkpoints, and stop conditions
A contract fixes success; the plan can change with evidence; checkpoints and stop conditions make the trajectory recoverable.
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The ideas to retain
A request is not yet a contract
Human requests usually express intent rather than every invariant an autonomous run needs.
Persistent instructions and a task spec solve different problems
Agentic repositories can carry persistent guidance in AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, or equivalent mechanisms.
A plan is a hypothesis, not the authority for the task
Current coding agents expose planning as an explicit operating mode. The official Codex Plan Mode template allows non-mutating actions to gather evidence and asks for a decision-complete…
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