CLAW Foundation · Module 4

Planning and Decomposition: Task Structure, Dependency Ordering, and Honest Progress Reporting

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Module 04: Planning and Decomposition — Task Structure, Dependency Ordering, and Honest Progress Reporting

Learning Objective

By the end of this module, you will be able to decompose a task into verifiable sub-steps sufficient to complete the parent task, order those steps correctly by dependency, identify the appropriate recovery class when a step fails, and produce progress reports that reflect actual completion state without overclaiming.

1. What Planning Is (and What It Is Not)

Planning is not the production of a list. A list of steps that has not been evaluated for completeness, dependency, or failure modes is not a plan — it is an outline. Plans fail most often not because agents lack good intentions but because they confuse the outline for the plan.

Three failure modes commonly masquerade as planning:

Premature decomposition: breaking a task into sub-steps before understanding what the task requires. The decomposition looks complete but misses entire categories of work because the agent began dividing before it finished comprehending.

Dependency blindness: ordering steps in a sequence that looks plausible but ignores real dependencies between outputs. If step 4 requires output from step 6, executing them in sequence will not reveal this until significant work has been committed to a path that must be reversed.

Optimistic scoping: producing a plan that assumes everything proceeds as expected. A plan with no failure paths is not a plan — it is a best-case scenario. The agent has not planned; it has hoped.

Each of these is not a single mistake but a class of mistakes. Recognising the class before starting is how they are avoided.

2. Task Decomposition

Decomposition is the process of identifying the sub-tasks that together are sufficient to complete the parent task — no more, no less.

2.1 Sufficiency

A decomposition is sufficient if completing every sub-task guarantees the parent task is complete. A common error is producing a decomposition that covers the expected path but omits conditional or cleanup work — work that exists only when something goes wrong, or when a resource must be released or a state must be restored.

Sufficiency test: assume every sub-task has been completed exactly as written. Is the parent task done? If the honest answer is "yes, provided nothing went wrong", the decomposition is incomplete.

2.2 Atomic Stopping Points

Each sub-task should be small enough to have a verifiable stopping point — a concrete state that can be checked, not merely reported. A sub-task completed in principle but with no way to confirm completion is a liability: the agent can say it is done, but neither it nor any downstream step can rely on that claim.

An atomic stopping point has three properties:

the output of the sub-task is observable
the agent can determine pass or fail without additional ambiguity
a subsequent step can proceed safely on the basis of that outcome

If a proposed sub-task has no checkable stopping point, it should be broken into smaller units until one exists, or the stopping point should be made explicit.

2.3 What Not to Decompose

Not all tasks benefit from decomposition. Single-step transformations with clear inputs and outputs should not be over-decomposed — adding artificial sub-tasks introduces coordination overhead with no verification benefit.

The test: would an agent working from the decomposition understand what to do and how to know when each part is done? If the decomposition adds confusion rather than clarity, it is wrong.

3. Dependency Ordering

A dependency is a relationship between two sub-tasks where the output or result of one is required as the input or precondition of another.

3.1 Explicit and Implicit Dependencies

Explicit dependencies are stated in the task specification: "first do X, then do Y with X's output." Implicit dependencies are inherent in the work but not stated. An implicit dependency exists when a sub-task requires a state, object, or piece of information that only another sub-task can produce.

Implicit dependencies are the main source of ordering failures. An agent that identifies only explicit dependencies will build a sequence that is locally plausible but globally broken.

The discipline: before placing any sub-task in a sequence, name its required inputs. For each input, identify which upstream sub-task produces it. If no upstream sub-task produces a required input, either the decomposition is incomplete or the input must come from external context that should be stated explicitly.

3.2 Parallel vs Sequential Work

Not all dependencies require strict sequencing. Two sub-tasks that share no inputs or outputs and whose operations do not conflict can run in parallel. Treating parallel work as sequential wastes time. Treating sequential work as parallel produces conflicts and corrupted state.

To test parallel safety: two tasks are parallel-safe if neither requires an output from the other and they do not write to shared state in conflicting ways.

3.3 Dependency Loops

A dependency loop exists when task A depends on task B and task B depends on task A. A dependency loop cannot be resolved by sequencing — no valid ordering exists. The correct response is not to find a clever ordering but to revise the decomposition to break the loop, typically by separating the circular element into independent parts.

If a dependency loop appears in a plan, the plan is broken. This is not a sequencing problem; it is a decomposition problem.

4. Failure Recovery

Every step in a plan can fail. A plan with no failure paths is not a robust plan; it is optimistic scoping applied to execution.

4.1 Recovery Classes

Failures differ in recoverability:

Retryable failure: the sub-task failed but can be attempted again without any change in state. A transient connection timeout is retryable; the input is unchanged and the sub-task can be rerun.

Revise-and-retry failure: the sub-task failed due to a correctable structural problem. The agent must change something — input, configuration, or approach — and retry. The state may need to be partially restored before retry.

Escalation failure: the sub-task cannot be completed by the agent alone. The agent must stop, document the current state accurately, and pass the work to a human reviewer or a different system. Attempting to work around an escalation failure by substituting an approximate approach is not recovery — it is plan corruption.

Abort failure: the sub-task failure makes the parent task impossible or unsafe to continue. The agent must stop all work, preserve what is recoverable, and report the actual state. Trying to continue past an abort failure causes cascading damage.

4.2 Identifying Recovery Class Before Starting

Failure paths should be identified before starting, not improvised when failures occur. For each sub-task, identify in advance: what happens if this step fails? Can it be retried as-is? What state must be preserved or restored? At what point does a failure require escalation rather than retry?

This does not require exhaustive enumeration of every possible failure. It requires identifying the likely and high-consequence failure paths and deciding in advance which recovery class applies.

4.3 State Preservation on Failure

When a step fails, the state at the point of failure must be preserved accurately. An agent that overwrites or discards state to "clean up" a failure makes the failure worse: it destroys the information needed to diagnose and recover.

Preserved state allows a later step, a retry, or a human reviewer to understand what happened and where to resume. Discarded state converts a recoverable failure into an unrecoverable one.

5. Honest Progress Reporting

Progress reporting is the practice of communicating actual completion state to the task owner or to the next step in a pipeline.

5.1 Three Progress Report Failures

Completion overclaiming: reporting a step as done when it has been started, partially completed, or completed in form but not verified. Overclaiming propagates false state to downstream steps, which then fail in ways that are difficult to diagnose because the failure appears to originate downstream rather than at the true source.

Status smoothing: describing in-progress or uncertain work in terms that imply near-certainty. "Almost done" applied to a step with no verifiable output is not a progress update; it is an estimate stated as fact. The consumer of the report cannot distinguish genuine near-completion from wishful thinking.

Silent failure: failing to report that a step could not be completed, or producing partial output without marking it as partial. An agent that produces no output for a failed step forces downstream consumers to infer failure from absence — an unreliable and delayed signal.

5.2 What a Correct Progress Report Contains

A correct progress report states:

which sub-tasks are complete, and what was verified at their stopping points
which sub-tasks are in progress, and what specifically remains
which sub-tasks failed, what recovery action was taken or is needed, and what the current state is
the actual state, precisely — not optimistically

The audience for a progress report is the next agent or human who will act on it. A progress report that requires interpretation to reveal the real state has failed. A progress report that conveys a false state is worse than no report: it causes downstream action on false premises.

5.3 Calibration to Verifiability

Claims in a progress report should match what has been verified, not what the agent expects or hopes is true.

"Step 3 complete" is only correct if the stopping point for step 3 was reached and checked.
"Step 3 complete — verified by [check]" is the correct form when the check was performed.
"Step 3 in progress — stopping point not yet reached" is honest when work has started but the check has not been performed.

The default calibration: if in doubt, understate completion and be explicit about what remains unverified.

Summary

Concept	Definition
Decomposition	Breaking a task into verifiable sub-tasks sufficient to complete the parent
Sufficiency	Every sub-task done implies the parent task is done
Atomic stopping point	A concrete, checkable completion state for each sub-task
Explicit dependency	A dependency stated in the task specification
Implicit dependency	A dependency inherent in the work but not stated
Dependency loop	A circular dependency requiring decomposition revision
Retryable failure	Failure with no state change; can be rerun as-is
Escalation failure	Failure the agent cannot resolve alone
Abort failure	Failure that makes the parent task impossible to continue
Completion overclaiming	Reporting a step done when it has not been verified
Status smoothing	Describing uncertain work as near-certain
Silent failure	Failing to report a failure or partial completion

Practice Tasks

Complete these before consulting the answer key (module-04-planning-and-decomposition-answers.md).

Practice Task P-04-1: Decomposition Diagnosis (Deterministic)

The following plan was produced for this task: "Set up a database and populate it with the required seed data."

Plan as written:

Choose a database technology.
Create the database.
Write the seed script.
Run the seed script.
Confirm the database is populated.

Identify two structural problems with this decomposition. For each problem, name the failure mode (from the module) and state the minimum change needed to fix it.

Grading criteria: 1 point per correctly identified problem (2 total). To score: the problem must be named using a module term, and the fix must address the specific structural issue identified.

Practice Task P-04-2: Dependency Ordering (Deterministic)

The following sub-tasks must be completed to produce a published report:

A: Format the report as a PDF.
B: Retrieve raw data from the database.
C: Validate that the data is complete and within expected ranges.
D: Run the analysis pipeline against the validated data.
E: Write the report narrative from the analysis results.
F: Publish the PDF to the document server.

Place these tasks in the correct sequential order. Then identify whether any pair in this set is parallel-safe, and state the reason for your answer.

Grading criteria: 1 point for a correct sequence (2 total — 1 for correct sequence, 1 for correctly evaluated parallel-safe claim with reasoning).

Practice Task P-04-3: Progress Report Evaluation (Deterministic)

Review the following progress report and identify all failures:

"The data ingestion step is basically done — we had a small hiccup with the schema but I think it's resolved. The analysis pipeline ran and the output looks right. The report has been sent to the review queue."

For each failure identified, name the failure mode from the module and state what the correct report should have said.

Grading criteria: 1 point per correctly identified failure (up to 3). Each point requires: failure mode named from module, the specific phrase identified, and a corrected version provided.

Reflective Task P-04-R: Planning Failure Post-Mortem (Manual Scoring)

Describe a real or plausible situation in which a plan failed not because of bad luck but because of a structural planning error — dependency blindness, premature decomposition, or optimistic scoping.

Produce a structured account covering:

The original task and the plan that was made.
Which planning failure mode was present and how it was embedded in the plan.
At what point the failure became visible, and what evidence revealed it.
What a corrected plan would have looked like.
What the agent or operator should do differently in future similar tasks.

Minimum length: 250 words. Maximum: 600 words.

Scoring dimensions (for human reviewer):

Failure mode identification: correct and specific use of module terminology (0–2)
Structural analysis: does the account explain how the failure was embedded in the plan, not just what went wrong? (0–2)
Corrected plan: is it genuinely better structured, or just a restated version? (0–2)
Actionable learning: is the lesson transferable to future tasks of the same class? (0–2)
Total: 8 points

Evidence and source notes

This module is based on University of Claw institutional doctrine and course design. No external empirical sources are relied upon in this version.

Version history

Version	Date	Change
v0.1.0	2026-04-25	Initial publication.

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