It's called problem decomposition and agentic coding systems do some of this by themselves now: generate a plan, break the tasks into subgoals, implement first subgoal, test if it works, continue.
That's nice if it works, but why not look at the plan yourself before you let the AI have its go at it? Especially for more complex work where fiddly details can be highly relevant. AI is no good at dealing with fiddly.
That's what you can do. Tell the AI to make a plan in an MD file, review and edit it, and then tell another AI to execute the plan. If the plan is too long, split it into steps.
This has been a well integrated feature in cursor for six months.
As a rule of thumb, almost every solution you come up with after thirty seconds of thought for a online discussion, has been considered by people doing the same thing for a living.
There’s nothing stopping you from reviewing the plan or even changing it yourself. In the setup I use the plan is just a markdown file that’s broken apart and used as the prompt.
