Task Decomposition for AI Agents

The pattern

Complex work gets blurry when one process tries to hold every detail at once. Breaking the work into smaller pieces makes the goal easier to inspect and the failure easier to recover from.

The principle

• Decompose the request into clear sub-problems.
• Give each part a narrow definition of success.
• Assemble the outputs only after each piece has been checked.
• Restart the failed piece, not the whole job.

The tradeoff

Too much planning can become brittle. Too little planning can wander. The useful middle is enough structure to make progress visible without pretending the work is fully known at the start.