← Concept IndexDEFINITION WHY IT MATTERS COMMONLY CONFUSED WITH
Planning & decomposition
Also called: breaking down a goal, agent planning, subtasks
An agent's step of turning a high-level goal into an ordered set of smaller actions it can actually carry out, then working through them — rather than trying to do everything in one leap.
It's what lets an agent tackle a multi-step task at all, and it's where things go wrong: a bad plan, or one built on a mistaken early step, sends every later action off course. Watching the plan is often more useful than watching the output.
Guaranteed competence. A plausible-looking plan can still be wrong or skip a crucial check; the agent generated it the same way it generates everything else.