CLAUDE CODE AGENTS: ADVANCED ORCHESTRATION - Chapter 6, Exercise 2
A Plan With No Alternatives Considered
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QUESTION:
A planning agent produces a plan that presents only one approach, with no
mention of any alternative considered or rejected. Explain what's missing
from this plan, using this chapter's own system-prompt guidance.

SOLUTION / EXPLANATION:

This chapter's system-prompt guidance is explicit that a planning agent
should name real tradeoffs explicitly, rather than presenting one option
as though it were the only possibility. A plan that only shows a single
approach with no alternatives mentioned at all fails this requirement
directly - it gives the reader no way to judge whether the recommended
approach was actually chosen deliberately, after weighing it against real
alternatives, or whether it's simply the first idea that came to mind,
presented without any comparison at all.

This matters for the exact reason this chapter gives for separating
planning from implementation in the first place: the whole value of a
reviewable plan is that a flawed approach can be caught and reconsidered
while it's still cheap to change. If the plan doesn't show what other
options existed and why they were set aside, a reviewer has no real basis
to evaluate whether the chosen approach is actually the right one - they
can only take the recommendation on faith, since there's nothing to
compare it against. This substantially weakens the review step's own real
value, even though a plan document technically exists.

A corrected version of this plan should name at least the realistic
alternatives that were considered (even briefly), state the concrete
tradeoffs between them relevant to this specific situation, and then
explain why the recommended approach was chosen given those tradeoffs -
giving the reviewer an actual, informed basis for approving or challenging
the recommendation, rather than just a single unquestioned assertion.

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WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER:
It identifies the specific missing element (real tradeoffs among named
alternatives) rather than vaguely saying the plan is "incomplete," and
explains concretely why omitting alternatives undermines the actual value
a reviewable plan is supposed to provide.