AI/Coding/Concept/Land the Plane
Land the plane
Examples
Podcast and source entries
- 1. Person/Steve Yegge/YouTube/26/02/Beyond Instructions How Beads Lets AI Agents Build Like Engineers (with Joe Reis; AI Engineer World's Fair talk and #Snipd transcript) [1]
- 2. AI Tinkerers, "Beyond Instructions: How Beads Lets AI Agents Build Like Engineers" (edited article/transcript) [2]
- 3. Latent Space/Pod, "Steve Yegge's Vibe Coding Manifesto: Why Claude Code Isn't It & What Comes After the IDE" [3]
What "land the plane" is
- "Land the plane" is a scripted end-of-session cleanup protocol that Person/Steve Yegge gives to his AI coding agents.
- When he says "let's land the plane," the agent runs a checklist of wrap-up tasks so the repo, issues, and context are left in a clean, ready-to-resume state [1], [2].
- He created it because he was "so sick of telling the agents that they had to clean up after themselves" after coding sessions [1], [2].
What the command actually does
- When the user says "land the plane," the agent follows a fixed checklist, roughly:
- Update Beads issues and carefully sync the issue tracker with what actually happened [1], [2].
- Clean up Git state: remove stashes, old branches, and other cruft [1], [2].
- Remove debugging artifacts and temporary files the agents left lying around [1], [2].
- Walk the Beads work tracker, choose the next thing to work on, and emit a suggested prompt for the next session so you can paste it in when you come back [1], [2].
- He treats this as a "clean session ending protocol" that always runs before you leave, primarily to combat agent "dementia" and human context loss between sessions [1], [2].
- When the user says "land the plane," the agent follows a fixed checklist, roughly:
Why it works well with LLM agents
- Person/Steve Yegge notes that models "love" checklists, acceptance criteria, and being able to declare they are done, because they were trained and rewarded on that pattern [2].
- Even when they are low on context, asking them to "land the plane" tends to produce thorough, reliable cleanup because:
- So "land the plane" is both:
How it fits into Yegge's broader system
- Beads: Person/Steve Yegge's Git-based issue/work tracker that agents constantly update; "land the plane" is tightly coupled to Beads state management [1], [2].
- Vibe Coder / gastown-style orchestrators: his Go-based orchestrator (Vibe Coder) runs full workflows that include the "land the plane" step: cost optimization, retries, self-healing agent colonies, and cleanup at the end of each workflow/session [3].
- Conceptually, "land the plane" is:
Footnotes