Agents & tools · Glossary term

What is Planning?

Constructing, selecting, or revising a sequence of actions and dependencies intended to move from the current state to a goal.

Why does Planning matter?

Explicit plans make assumptions and ordering visible before an agent commits to expensive or irreversible actions.

Ask for a short dependency-aware plan, validate it against available tools and permissions, then re-plan when observations invalidate an assumption.

A generated plan is a proposal, not proof that the steps are feasible, sufficient, or safe.

Lessons that name Planning in a title or section

ReWOO and Plan-and-Execute: Decoupled Planning
ReAct interleaves thought and action in one stream. ReWOO separates them: one big plan up front, then execute. 5x fewer tokens, +4% accuracy on HotpotQA, and you can distill the planner into a 7B…
Phase 14: Agent Engineering
Planning with HTN and Evolutionary Search
Symbolic planning handles the cases where the plan is provably correct. Evolutionary code search handles the cases where the fitness function is machine-checkable.
Phase 14: Agent Engineering

Agent StateThe explicit data an agent carries across steps, such as the current objective, completed actions, tool results, open questions, budgets,…
ReActAn agent pattern that interleaves task reasoning, a concrete action, and an observation returned by the environment before deciding the…
OrchestrationThe control logic that sequences, branches, delegates, retries, pauses, resumes, and terminates work across model and tool steps.
Verification GateA control point that blocks progress until defined evidence satisfies a correctness or quality criterion.