Planning

Planning is a key design pattern of Agentic Reasoning. It refers to an agent breaking a complex task into smaller, manageable steps before or while it carries them out.

Planning can be open-loop, where the agent creates the whole plan up front and executes it without adjustments (Open-loop Planning). Or it can be closed-loop, where the agent plans an action, executes it, observes the outcome, and then plans the next step based on the new state (Closed-loop Planning).

Chain-of-Thought Prompting is related, since writing out intermediate steps is a kind of plan. But planning in an agentic system usually means acting on the plan, not just reasoning about it.