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Autonomous Planning Recipes

Contenox plan mode turns a high-level goal into a sequence of verified steps. It's an agentic loop: it plans, you approve (or use --auto), and it executes using local tools.

Scaffolding a new project

Instead of manually creating directories and files, describe your project structure and let Contenox build it.

Create a plan for a new Go service:

contenox plan new "scaffold a new Go project named 'weather-api' with a cmd/ main.go, an internal/ weather package, and a Dockerfile"

Review and execute:

# See what it planned
contenox plan show

# Execute the first step
contenox plan next --shell

# Or run the whole plan autonomously
contenox plan next --auto --shell

Batch Documentation Generation

Generate README.md or DEVELOPMENT.md files for subdirectories by having the agent analyze each folder's contents.

contenox plan new "crawl the internal/ directory and create a README.md in each subdirectory explaining its purpose and main symbols"

How it works

Unlike run (stateless) or chat (conversational), plan is stateful and persistent:

  1. Generation: The model breaks your goal into discrete, actionable steps stored in a local SQLite database.
  2. State Management: Each step tracks its own status (pending, running, completed, failed).
  3. Tool-Augmented Execution: The executor uses the chain-step-executor.json which is optimized for calling local_shell and local_fs tools.
  4. Verification: The model is instructed to verify the result of a tool call before marking a step as done.

Tips for Reliable Planning

  • Enable Shell Access: Most plans require --shell to actually perform work on the filesystem.
  • Granular Goals: If a plan feels too large, the model might miss details. Break complex projects into smaller plans.
  • Interactive Correction: If a step fails, use contenox plan retry <N> or contenox plan replan to let the model adjust the remaining steps based on the new state.
  • Security: Always review the plan steps with contenox plan show before running with --auto --shell.
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