Landing the Plane
Landing the Plane is a session termination protocol for AI agents, formalized by Steve Yegge (creator of the Beads framework). It addresses the “amnesia” problem where agents lose context between sessions and leave “crap” (temporary artifacts) behind. The Problem Without a disciplined shutdown process: Context Loss: The next session starts fresh (“50 First Dates”), leading to repetitive re-explanation. Repo Pollution: Abandoned git branches, stashes, and debugging artifacts clutter the workspace. State Drift: The issue tracker (or mental model) falls out of sync with the actual code state. The Protocol When a user says “Land the plane,” the agent executes a scripted checklist to safely close the session: ...