Cocoa: Co-Planning and Co-Execution with AI Agents

Understand

As AI agents take on increasingly long-running tasks involving sophisticated planning and execution, there is a corresponding need for novel interaction designs that enable deeper human-agent collaboration.

• However, most prior works leverage human interaction to fix "autonomous" workflows that have yet to become fully autonomous or rigidly treat planning and execution as separate stages.
• Based on a formative study with 9 researchers using AI to support their work, we propose a design that affords greater flexibility in collaboration, so that users can 1) delegate agency to the user or agent via a collaborative plan where individual steps can be assigned; and 2) interleave planning and execution so that plans can adjust after partial execution.
• We introduce Cocoa, a system that takes design inspiration from computational notebooks to support complex research tasks.