---
title: Specs, plans, checkpoints, and stop conditions
seo_title: Specs, plans, checkpoints, and stop conditions — video
description: A contract fixes success; the plan can change with evidence; checkpoints and stop conditions make the trajectory recoverable.
keywords: coding agents, task specification, agent planning, task decomposition, checkpoints, agent harness, acceptance criteria
date: '2026-09-10T00:00:00+00:00'
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    <h1>Specs, plans, checkpoints, and stop conditions</h1><p>A contract fixes success; the plan can change with evidence; checkpoints and stop conditions make the trajectory recoverable.</p>
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    <div class="s5-video-watch__snippet-grid"><article><span>01</span><h2>A request is not yet a contract</h2><p>Human requests usually express intent rather than every invariant an autonomous run needs.</p></article>
<article><span>02</span><h2>Persistent instructions and a task spec solve different problems</h2><p>Agentic repositories can carry persistent guidance in AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, or equivalent mechanisms.</p></article>
<article><span>03</span><h2>A plan is a hypothesis, not the authority for the task</h2><p>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…</p></article></div>
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<li><a href="?t=12" data-s5-video-seek="12"><time>0:12</time><span>Plan, evidence, checkpoint, and replan</span></a></li>
<li><a href="?t=24" data-s5-video-seek="24"><time>0:24</time><span>Done, recover, blocked, or escalate</span></a></li></ol></section>
  
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