I’ve long maintained that the biggest unlock with AI coding agents is the planning step. In my previous post, I describe how I use a .ai/plans directory and ask the agent to diligently write down its tasks before and during execution.

Most coding agents now include this as a feature. Cursor, for example, introduced it as an explicit feature recently.

While that all felt validating, on a plane ride home I watched OpenAI’s DevDay. One of the most valuable sessions was Shipping with Codex. Aaron Friel — credited with record-long sessions and token output — walked through his process and the idea of “ExecPlans.” It felt similar at first, but I quickly realized this was some god-level planning.

He said OpenAI would release his PLANS.md soon, but I couldn’t wait. On that flight, with janky wifi, I rebuilt what I could from the talk and grew my baby plan into something more mature — and I was already seeing better results. I pinged Aaron on BlueSky for the full doc, and he very kindly shared the PR that’s about to get merged with detailed information.

My god, this thing is a work of art. Aaron clearly spent a lot of time honing it. I’ve tried it on two PRs so far, and it’s working fantastically. I still need to put it through its paces on some larger work projects, but I feel comfortable preemptively calling it the gold standard for planning.

I’ve made a few small tactical tweaks to how I use it:

1. I instruct the agent to write plans to .ai/plans (works across coding agents)
2. In my AGENTS.md I tell agents to put temporary plans in .ai/plans/tmp (which I’ve gitignored)
3. I keep the master PLANS.md Aaron shared at @.ai/plans/PLANS.md

This is really a big unlock, folks. Try it now.

I’ll update this post once it’s merged or if anything changes.