Why I use markdown plan files instead of Cursor and Claude's built-in planning

The technique that helped me jump over the threshold from "coding with AI" to actually "vibe coding" was the use of a plain markdown file. Interestingly, it wasn't Cursor's built-in planning mode, nor Claude's in-memory task lists. It was a plain markdown file, with numbered subtasks, and a breakdown of the work that needed to be done. Early on, I stayed "hands-on" with the coding agent, because I was concerned about multi-part problems, about the AI coding agent "jumping in too soon", and that I wouldn't know how the code worked if the AI hallucinated or ran out of context (tokens). But I found that vibe coding with markdown plans meant that I had an artifact that (quickly) helped me be more intentional with design. In this article, I'll share the prompt I put into AGENTS.md (which I've shared on Github ), what worked, and what didn't. But first, I'll share some context about how I got there, because I think the path is relevant to a pattern I hear a lot of engineers get stuck in. How