Break tasks into smaller, checkable steps

Decomposing a large task into small steps with checkpoints makes each step reliable, localizes failures, and lets the agent recover without redoing everything.

Small steps fail small

A single giant prompt that tries to do everything is hard to make reliable and impossible to debug. Breaking the work into discrete steps means each one can be validated, retried, and reasoned about on its own. When something fails, you know which step and why.

Plan, then execute

Many reliable agent designs separate planning from doing: the agent lays out the steps, then works through them, checking state between each. Patterns and frameworks for this are covered well in Building effective agents and orchestration tools like LangGraph.

Checkpoint between steps

Save progress at each step so a failure late in a task does not throw away the work done early. Checkpoints are what make partial failure recoverable rather than catastrophic.