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Why your agent's plan disappears, and what to do about it
npm install --global @thisisnsh/planx
Here's something that happens often and rarely gets named: an agent plans something, you read it, approve it, it starts building. Twenty minutes later you're looking at a diff, and something in it is wrong — not broken, just not what you agreed to. You scroll up to check what the plan actually said.
It's forty screens back, buried in tool output, and you can no longer tell whether the diff contradicts the plan or you're just misremembering.
That's the failure. Not the agent going rogue — the plan quietly ceasing to exist as something you can check against.
Three ways a plan disappears
It scrolls. The plan is a message in a buffer you're also using for everything else. Tool output, file contents, and your own prompts pile on top of it. Technically still there; practically gone.
It gets compacted. Long sessions summarize. The agent's memory of the plan becomes a paraphrase of a paraphrase, and it builds from that — you can't see when this happens or what survived.
It ends with the session. Close the terminal and the plan is gone entirely. The code stays. The reasoning behind it doesn't.
All three share a root cause: the plan was never a thing. It was a message about a thing.
What that costs
You can't check the work against it. Reviewing a diff means asking "is this what we agreed?" — which needs the agreement to still be readable. When it isn't, you end up judging the diff on its own merits, a much weaker question.
You can't see revision as revision. A second plan is just another long message, so a quiet rewrite of the whole strategy can slip past in response to a narrow objection.
You can't hand it to anything else — another agent, a colleague, tomorrow's you. The plan lives in one conversation and can't leave it.
You approve without reading. If the plan won't be checkable later, reading it carefully now buys less, so you skim. A plan approved without reading is worse than no plan — it converts your judgment into a rubber stamp and adds a step.
The fix is boring
Make the plan a file. Once it's a file with a version number:
it doesn't scroll, compact, or end with the session
it's still there when you review the diff, so you can open it beside the code
v2 can be shown as a diff against v1, so a rewritten approach can't slip past as re-flowed text
it can be handed to a different agent than the one that wrote it
approval refers to something specific — v2, not "the plan"
You can get a chunk of this with no tool at all: have the agent write PLAN.md, review it in your editor, commit it. If the plan belongs in the repo's history — a migration other people need to read — that's a good answer, and git gives you diffs for free.
What it won't give you:
a recorded session to resume with your comments in context
an "approved version" a build command can refer to
comments anchored to lines instead of prose the agent has to interpret
What PlanX adds on top of "a file"
The plan lives outside the repo, in ~/.planx, one directory per plan, every version kept.
Comments attach to lines.v to select, f to comment — a location, not a paraphrase.
Revisions arrive as diffs. Word-level, unchanged runs collapsed. What used to cost minutes to re-read costs seconds, so you ask for the changes you actually want.
Long plans stay readable.space folds the section under the cursor — fold what you agree with, and what's left is what you're deciding on.
Revision resumes the session that did the research, continued, with your feedback and the same launch flags.
Approval is a number.revise, execute, and show all refuse to default to latest, because a plan can gain a version between your review and the command.
The thing to take away
Next time an agent hands you a plan you're about to approve, check whether you could find it again in an hour. If you couldn't, you're not reviewing it — you're agreeing to it.
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Why your agent's plan disappears, and what to do about it
Here's something that happens often and rarely gets named: an agent plans something, you read it, approve it, it starts building. Twenty minutes later you're looking at a diff, and something in it is wrong — not broken, just not what you agreed to. You scroll up to check what the plan actually said.
It's forty screens back, buried in tool output, and you can no longer tell whether the diff contradicts the plan or you're just misremembering.
That's the failure. Not the agent going rogue — the plan quietly ceasing to exist as something you can check against.
Three ways a plan disappears
All three share a root cause: the plan was never a thing. It was a message about a thing.
What that costs
The fix is boring
Make the plan a file. Once it's a file with a version number:
v2, not "the plan"You can get a chunk of this with no tool at all: have the agent write
PLAN.md, review it in your editor, commit it. If the plan belongs in the repo's history — a migration other people need to read — that's a good answer, and git gives you diffs for free.What it won't give you:
What PlanX adds on top of "a file"
The plan lives outside the repo, in
~/.planx, one directory per plan, every version kept.vto select,fto comment — a location, not a paraphrase.spacefolds the section under the cursor — fold what you agree with, and what's left is what you're deciding on.revise,execute, andshowall refuse to default tolatest, because a plan can gain a version between your review and the command.The thing to take away
Next time an agent hands you a plan you're about to approve, check whether you could find it again in an hour. If you couldn't, you're not reviewing it — you're agreeing to it.
More: Why review an agent's plan · Plan mode vs. a reviewable plan
Install
Node 20.19+. Then
/planx <task>in Claude Code,$planx <task>in Codex — start a new session first.MIT, nothing hosted, plans are local files that stay on your machine. If this named a problem you had, a star helps the next person find it.
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