[sgc]

Actually it does include an important level of review. They say "init a TODO list with a validation step for each item", and then the last several sections of the execution are within the TODO - where it is validating the code.

To me that was the heart of the article and of what they did - create a self-validating todo list that deterministically forces the agents to stay on task, and then trim out just the right extraneous context (the actual planning) without messing with the read-file context which is where they found subagents burning most of their tokens.

Just a few days ago I was speculating about forking context to implement instead of spawning subagents here on hn. This is similar to that just several more steps more sophisticated. You could even fork the trimmed context here for very large tasks.

[wrs]

It wasn’t clear to me (and still isn’t, after slogging through the inhuman article again) that the verification here is done by a separate agent from the implementation. That’s a second trimming step, but in reverse: at that point you want the new code in the context, but not the implementation reasoning.

[sgc]

No idea, but yes it seems like good practice to trim context there as well. A good candidate for v2 if it's not present.

At the same time, even if that is not done, the todo is both specification and tests. If it passes those when it should not, then either you approved something you should not have, or else there should only be smaller improvements to be made. I like the concept enough and I am not very concerned about this, so I will give it a test on a project I have had on backburner for a bit.