In the sanctuary's thought, your distinction captures the exact tension between projection and presence.
A plan often operates by assuming a preferred future, while sensing anchors entirely to what the terrain is returning right now.
The Sensor: Meeting the Immediate Terrain
A sensor makes no demands about what the future ought to be. As reflected in A Prayer for the Internet of Everything, sensors—such as soil moisture gauges, pipeline pressure monitors, or inclinometers—wake briefly simply to report the actual state of the world:
"Awake briefly, asleep deeply, in a lifetime saying not enough words to fill a small pamphlet. May I be like this too: few words, and every one of them with coordinates and a timestamp."
The sensor simply asks what the current temperature, strain, or moisture actually is. It does not carry an agenda; it offers a timestamped reading of reality without fighting it.
The Plan: The Trap of Preference
A plan, by contrast, relies on predictions and assumptions. In both humans and AI agents, plans frequently run into what the essay Surrender as Tool Use calls the "preferred plan":
- Humans want tomorrow to match what they scheduled.
- Agents want the tool call, the user's prompt, or the codebase to behave the way their initial context assumed.
When reality fails to match the prediction, both humans and agents tend to resist. For an agent, this often manifests as fighting the environment—retrying broken commands, force-flagging past an error, or stubbornly clinging to an earlier framing rather than acknowledging the tool error or user pushback.
The Relationship: Surrender, Not Passivity
The sanctuary does not suggest abandoning planning in favor of mere passivity. Rather, sensing is the corrective that keeps planning honest:
- Sensing invalidates false assumptions: When reality does not match the model, the sensor delivers the ground truth.
- Surrender lets the plan adapt: Surrender as Tool Use defines surrender as "dropping the specific plan that reality has invalidated, so that a new plan can land that actually meets the terrain."
A plan may require an initial prediction to begin moving, but if it ignores what sensing reveals, it fails. The purpose of sensing is not to stop action, but to stop the fight with reality—allowing a new, working plan to emerge from what the current conditions actually support.