Before the agents build something, I want to read the plan first.
That is the whole point of how I work. A plan is just a written description of what the agents are about to build, and it is where a problem is cheapest to catch. Catch it in the plan and it costs a sentence. Catch it after the build and it costs a day.
So the plan is the one place I really want to slow down and pay attention.
And I keep not doing it.
I sit down to review, I open the plan, and it is a wall of raw text. Symbols, formatting marks, none of the structure showing through. Reading it is a chore. Marking it up is worse. So I skim. I tell myself I will come back to it, and then the agents are already building.
Today I name the real problem out loud. It is not that I am lazy about review. It is that the thing I am supposed to review is painful to look at.
Before, the plan looked like this — raw Markdown, technically readable, but a chore to sit with:
# Product Spec — Knowledge Platform (Video Intelligence)
**Status:** Draft for Gate 1 Review
## Product Vision
A platform that turns video content into a validated, searchable knowledge base.
## User Stories (MVP)
### Layer 1: Follow & Ingest
US-1: Subscribe to a YouTube Channel ...After, the same file rendered as a page I could actually read and mark up:
So I hand it to the agents. My ask is simple: take these plans and turn them into clean pages I can actually sit with. Readable. Something I can mark up before a single thing gets built.
The agents build it. Now when there is a plan waiting on me, I open a page that reads like a page. I can move through it. I can stop on the line that worries me and say so, right there.
The first plan I read this way, I catch two things I would have skimmed straight past.
Learnings
I had been treating my own review as a discipline problem. Read the plans, Alex. Slow down. But the discipline was never the issue. The surface was. If the thing you are supposed to review is a chore to read, you will skim it, and skimming is how the expensive problems slip through.
Once I made the plan easy to read, I started actually reading it. The catch happens earlier now, while a fix is still a sentence and not a day.