Vol. IX · The Agent-Computer Interface · IX.5
Show the Loop
If the human cannot see the plan, the tool call, and the observation as they happen, they cannot interrupt, cannot trust, and cannot debug. Transparency of the loop is a product requirement, not a nice-to-have trace.
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Doctrine
- Stream tokens, tool names, and diffs. Hide nothing that a reviewer would need after the fact.
- Show the plan and let the human edit it before act mode. Cline's plan/act split is the UX of Factor 8.
- An interrupt is a first-class event: pause, revise, resume from checkpoint.
The visible reducer
LangGraph streams events. Vercel AI SDK streams tool parts. Langfuse is the after-action review. The product in the middle must still render the loop: current goal, current step, pending ask, files touched. Anthropic's 'show the plan' is this article in one sentence.
Anti-patterns
- A spinner that says 'thinking' for forty seconds while files change on disk.
- Dumping a full trace only after failure.