Reading CMU 11-768 L5: Planning — When an Agent Should Think It Through, and When It Should Revise as It Goes
Lecture 5 of CMU 11-768 defines an agent's plan as an explicit, inspectable, revisable representation of intended behavior for this task, and gives four reasons to add planning structure: modularity, environment feedback, long horizons, and control. Fried's own MACU has a manager decompose tasks into a DAG and dispatch parallel sub-agents, raising Odysseys success from 8.5% to 34.0%; on an OSWorld subset, no planning scores 25.0%, an initial DAG with no revisions scores 27.8%, and allowing 10 revisions reaches 58.3%.