I’d rather play with the plan than read it

Planning with an agent through a chat interface usually ends in a document: phases, file lists, open questions, and a request for a yes. I skim it and say yes. What each of us meant only shows up later, in the diff. Now I ask for a few versions of the idea I can try. A prototype I can click through, a behavior I can change. Rough is fine. It only has to be real enough to react to. One reply, four versions of how a chat app follows it as it streams in. From Displaying long replies. Play it on the page. Trying them changes how I decide. I notice something I hadn’t thought to ask about, combine parts of two versions, or want to try something else entirely. Often that is how I find out what I wanted in the first place. Bret Victor’s Media for Thinking the Unthinkable gets at this: seeing a system respond as we change it helps us reason about it. We can inspect what happens instead of keeping the whole thing running in our heads. Or take a plan for a busy day. Give the writing another…