jidoka

Writing jidoka was fun, and I still use it daily, but long term I'm not sure if Plan Mode will prevail. Still haven't found a project which guarantees tool calling after ExitPlanMode so I'm pretty proud of that. Below is what I wrote in X to promote it.

AI companies constantly boast about how long their models can run without human intervention, but for certain class of software , as Mitchell says, "HITL(human-in-the-loop) agents are still super important".

Even if (very big if) the model can produce the perfect code, it can always be the case that the original assumption was wrong, or that the agent wasn't provided enough background. More importantly, the diff has to be small enough before each review for the human to catch errors while also maintaining knowledge of how the software works end to end.

Like many others I solve this problem by 1) defining the spec before the implementation and 2) splitting the task into smaller problems. For 1, it's my experience that using the native plan mode embedded in the agents such as Claude Code provides the best outcome.

However when using plan mode in Claude Code, it is not straightforward how to split the tasks. You can inject the prompt before entering plan mode, but plan mode in Claude Code prohibits file write, and overall there is unnecessary human intervention for a simple objective.

That's why I wrote jidoka, an opinionated Claude Code plugin that builds on top of native plan mode, turning the plan into reviewable units.

The idea is simple: we enforce that jidoka is called in plan mode by blocking ExitPlanMode with PreToolUse, and the skill has prompts that guide the plan mode agent to split the task into reviewable units. We add an overview.md and progress.md and wrap it up in a directory so that each unit can be separately implemented but merged as a whole.

Since the plan is split into units, we can also easily add review agents between units. Plugins such as /code-review can be used, but a more robust way is using a different model such as GPT or GLM to do the review.

There are several more ideas in the repo, but the gist is that with jidoka, plan mode just becomes much better. And the best part is, once installed it is naturally invoked each time plan mode is used. Check the README for details (100% written manually).