Make Agent Planning Visible: Three Interface Patterns That Build Trust

A researcher argues users cannot trust what they cannot see, so agent planning must be shown, not hidden, and names three interface patterns: shadow preview runs without committing and shows what would happen, replayable execution scrubs through steps like a video player, and retry refactoring reruns only the failed segment. Product teams get a definition of thicker that avoids more buttons: expose the system's intermediate state, the plan, dry-run result and diff. Showing that state is the shortest path to user trust in autonomous agents.