Agentic Coding 11: Pre-Planning Failure

Agents that hit a wall and freeze are useless — unless you pre-planned the failure. Learn to write fallback chains with ranked contingencies, a minimum floor, and an autonomy grant so your agents keep driving forward without you. Master both-branch async checks, failure-question add-ons, and authorize-the-loop to turn stalled sessions into unattended progress.

Where you'll use it

• Keeping long-running agents unblocked when a first approach fails
• Writing async-check prompts that cover both done and still-running states
• Authorizing fix-test-fix loops that converge without constant supervision
• Surfacing blast radius and verification criteria before a risky action runs
• Converting single-path prompts into resilient multi-fallback instructions