FWIW GPT-4 is able to generate a plan very similar to one in the article: also involves feature extraction, program synthesis, iterative refinement.

https://chatgpt.com/share/2fde1db5-00cf-404d-9ae5-192aa5ac90...

So it's pretty close to being able to plan solution completely on its own. It's just rather bad at coding and visual inputs, so it doesn't know what it doesn't know.