{"slug": "stop-watching-your-agent-work", "title": "Stop watching your agent work", "summary": "Agent-Native released Agent-Native Plans, a free, open-source tool that lets coding agents produce visual documents for planning and review, built around two skills called Visual Plan and Visual Recap. Visual Plan explains a proposed change with wireframes, API flow diagrams, annotated code, open questions and an implementation sequence, while Visual Recap explains a completed change and can be connected to CI so recaps appear automatically on pull requests. The tool is aimed at replacing continuous monitoring of an agent's tool calls and file changes with a conversation before the work starts and a review of the result afterward.", "body_md": "# Stop watching your agent work\n\n[Agent-Native](https://www.builder.io/blog/topics/agent-native)\n\nThe least productive thing I can imagine doing is watching an agent work.\n\nI still catch myself doing it. Reading the tool calls, watching files change, waiting to see whether it understood what I meant. It feels like oversight, but it’s a strange way to delegate. We don’t spend the afternoon watching a coworker type to make sure they’re solving the right problem.\n\nWith coworkers, we agree on what we’re trying to accomplish and review the result. I want the same thing with a coding agent: a conversation before it starts, and another when it comes back. Ideally, I can leave it alone in between.\n\nBut reading pages of plans and summaries takes attention. My eyes glaze over, and the important decisions get buried. I want something I can understand at a glance.\n\nShow me the onboarding steps. Show me the API contract. Give me somewhere to point when something is wrong.\n\nThat’s the problem we’re exploring with [Agent-Native Plans](https://www.agent-native.com/apps/plan/?ref=alice), a free, open-source tool for reviewing what an agent plans to build and what it built.\n\nPrefer a walkthrough? [Here’s a demo of Plans in action](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Ox4JDcr_A):\n\n## What is Agent-Native Plans?\n\nAgent-Native Plans gives a coding agent a way to produce visual documents for planning and review. Two skills do most of the work.\n\n- **Visual Plan** explains a proposed change. Depending on the work, that might include wireframes, a diagram of an API flow, annotated code, open questions, or an implementation sequence.\n- **Visual Recap** explains a completed change, connecting the code to the behavior it changes. You can also[connect it to CI](https://github.com/BuilderIO/agent-native/blob/main/.github/workflows/pr-visual-recap.yml) so recaps appear automatically on pull requests.\n\nYou can share these documents and comment on specific parts of them. You, your teammates, and the agent have the same thing in front of you when talking about what should happen next.\n\nLet’s look at a proposed UI change, then two completed pull requests from the Agent-Native repository.\n\n## Before implementation: inspect what the agent thinks you mean\n\nConsider a small change to Clips, our recording app: move the recording sidebar from the right side of the player to the left, and make it collapsible.\n\nThat sounds like a clear request. An agent could start moving components and adding a toggle right away. But it still has to make a few choices:\n\n- When the sidebar collapses, what stays visible?\n- Where does the control for reopening it go?\n- Should the panel remember what you were looking at?\n- What happens on a smaller screen?\n\nI might have opinions about all of those without thinking to specify them in my first message. The agent will need to fill in whatever I leave out.\n\nWith the visual-plan skill installed, Codex can make those choices visible before writing the implementation. The [Clips sidebar plan](https://plan.agent-native.com/plans/plan-207606ba865e413f?ref=alice) shows the current layout, the proposed expanded and collapsed layouts, a mobile state, and an interactive prototype. It also includes behavior requirements and a checklist for testing the change.\n\nNow I can compare the layouts and see where the collapse control goes. Instead of agreeing to “make it collapsible,” I’m agreeing—or objecting—to a particular control in a particular place.\n\nThe text still matters. A wireframe won’t tell me whether the panel remembers its state, for example. But I can read that requirement while looking at the panel it describes.\n\nThis is what I want from the first conversation with an agent. We work through the decisions that need me before it spends time and tokens implementing them.\n\n## Point to what you want changed\n\nCommenting on a plan feels much more natural than trying to describe a screen back to an agent. I can highlight a passage or pin a comment to a spot in a wireframe. “Can we try another version of this?” comes with the exact text or control I mean.\n\nIn the Clips plan, the comment sits beside the proposed reopen control. The agent gets a specific design decision to revisit, without having to guess which toggle I’m talking about. I can send that feedback back to the agent and ask it to revise the plan.\n\nA designer or PM can review the same document and leave feedback in context, without reading the original coding conversation or setting up the app locally.\n\nThe sidebar is still a proposal here. I’d rather sort out the control now than ask for a different one after the agent has built it.\n\n## After implementation: understand what came back\n\nThe second conversation happens when the agent comes back with code. Take a separate, completed change: [PR #3774, “Add selection-triggered reference tagging for design generation.”](https://github.com/BuilderIO/agent-native/pull/3774)\n\nThat title tells me roughly what changed, but I still want to know what it means in the editor. What happens when someone selects a layer? Where does the new context go? What should I look for in the code?\n\nThe [visual recap](https://plan.agent-native.com/recaps/recap-f063e641e39941f7?ref=alice) shows the editor interaction before and after, including the new **Add to Context** action. It also explains how the editor tracks the selected element as that selection changes.\n\nA diff is organized around files and changed lines. That’s useful once I know where to look. The recap gives me a faster way into the review: I can see the interaction first, then use the overview and annotated code to ask specific questions. Does the selected context match what the person meant to reference? What happens when the selection changes?\n\nNow I know what to check in the code and the running app. When an agent comes back from a long task, this is the explanation I want: what changed, how it should behave, and where I should focus my review.\n\n## This also applies to changes you can’t screenshot\n\nThe same approach helped explain [my PR exposing Content comment actions through MCP](https://github.com/BuilderIO/agent-native/pull/3772). It changes how tools create and update comments, including who gets to decide a comment’s author.\n\nThe tool no longer accepts author information from its caller. It gets that information from the authenticated user instead. Replies also need to belong to the right document and thread.\n\nThe [recap](https://plan.agent-native.com/recaps/recap-dd345000ccf84869?ref=alice) uses a diagram and annotated code to show how those checks fit together.\n\nThat gives me specific things to check: can callers still use the tool with its new inputs? Does it correctly identify the author and validate replies?\n\nA useful visual can explain a system as well as a screen. An API boundary or a sequence of operations gives us something concrete to talk about, even when the app looks the same afterward.\n\n## Spend less time watching\n\nPlans helps me stop watching and let the agent work. We agree on the approach before it starts. When it comes back, I can compare what it built with what we agreed on.\n\nThat gets me to a useful review faster. I still read and test the code to make sure it does what the plan says.\n\nI want to spend less time watching an agent work and more time making the decisions it needs from me.\n\nTry it on the next change you’re about to make: [set up Agent-Native Plans](https://www.agent-native.com/apps/plan/?ref=alice). Ask your agent for a visual plan, point out what you want changed, and then let it work. It’s free and [open source](https://github.com/BuilderIO/agent-native).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-watching-your-agent-work", "canonical_source": "https://www.builder.io/blog/stop-watching-your-agent-work", "published_at": "2026-09-23 16:02:59.981418+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-23 16:03:01.621169+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "developer-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Agent-Native", "Agent-Native Plans", "Visual Plan", "Visual Recap", "Codex", "Clips", "BuilderIO"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-watching-your-agent-work", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-watching-your-agent-work.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-watching-your-agent-work.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-watching-your-agent-work.jsonld"}}