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July 6, 2026·Arjun Malhotra
The Death of the Autonomous Planning Agent
Stop paying the hallucination tax. When you ask an AI to build a feature without constraints, you get bloat and missed marks.
I use three commands - in this exact order:
- /grill-me: Forces the agent to interview you one question at a time until scope is locked.
- /blueprint: Breaks the work into self-contained steps. Any fresh agent session can execute without reading prior context.
- /ponytail: A 7-rung hierarchy that forces the agent to pick native, minimal, or existing solutions before writing a single line.
The order matters. Grill first. Plan second. Constrain third.
Stop treating LLMs like interns told to figure it out. Give them constraints, verify intent, then execute.