A separate pre-planning step, so the context window doesn’t get too full too early on.

Off the shelf agentic coding tools should be doing this for you.

They do not.

At my company, I use them all the time with the fancy models and everything. Preplanning does not solve the problem they're describing.

When claude is doing a complex task, it will regularly lose track of the rules (in either the .rules stuff or CLAUDE.md) and break conventions.

It follows it most of the time, but not all of the time.