I use Claude's Plan mode daily and it's great. I almost always have feedback to refine the plan and I want a clean separation of planning time before writing code. I don't get what the problem is.

I also find this "kill Plan mode" push on Twitter odd, because developers have been complaining about AI supposedly killing their jobs, yet they want to take away the main feature that lets them be an active collaborator and participator in the process. Weird.

I also don’t get what the problem is. Claude’s plan mode is great, especially when you add interviewing into the equation. It means I can get to a point where I’m confident all the changes proposed make sense, and that I understand them, before anything is actually changed.

I feel like this post is hawking for commercial reasons more than it’s based in reality, especially a reality that takes into account the extremely varied experiences engineers seem to have with agents. Not to mention it ignores capabilities that, for example, Claude’s VS Code addin have had for ages (specifically select and annotate in plan mode, as I mentioned in another comment).

As such I’m not inclined to take it very seriously. More than that, the “X is dead” trope was overdone 10 years ago and I don’t think it’s been long enough to warrant a resurgence.

I see what you’re saying. That’s actually why I built Nuanced (https://www.nuanced.dev), I wanted a better way for humans and agents to work through intent before the code got written.

but I think I overfit the interface to how I used to work without agents. when I was at GitHub, I wrote a lot of ADRs, RFCs, and design docs, and I liked that because writing is how I clarify my own thinking. with agents though, I’m often not doing the writing myself. I give the model a rough intent and it fills in a bunch of gaps, and then I get back a long, polished plan containing decisions I didn’t explicitly make.

That’s the part that feels broken to me. The plan can be detailed and technically correct, but still be hard to review because the important bits are buried and feel distant from my own thinking. All the assumptions and tradeoffs and questions may or may not be legitimate, but it’s hard for me to get into flow state and carefully check them.

So I still want the collaboration step. I’m just less convinced that generated prose à la plan mode is the right interface for it.

I likewise don't understand this push. Surely it's a trivial feature to keep enabled. It mostly seems like advertising that "our models are so smart you don't need to plan". But I find it to be a great mental review process for my workflow.

It sounds like the Ant perspective is "you can just ask claude to plan", but at the same time that's a little more tedious than shift+tab

> developers have been complaining about AI supposedly killing their jobs, yet they want to take away the main feature that lets them be an active collaborator and participator in the process.

Goomba fallacy. These are two distinct groups of people.

Yeah, honestly, I'm wondering, not even why people are against plan-mode, but how they're getting stuff done without it.

Maybe it's me (it usually is), but I don't give an LLM small tasks that a human could knock out in a half-day. I give them big tasks, stuff that would take a human a few months to a year - and then I ask it to give me a plan, as a living document, and we spend a good hour or two iterating over the plan.

Then, when its finally at the point where I'm happy with the plan, and I've talked it down from wherever it first wanted to go, or pointed out that we don't need to be all-things-to-all-(wo)men and focus is important, I get it to start going through it.

Likewise, I get it to maintain TODO.md with lists of known bugs, separate lists of future-features, and again, I make a rule that this file must be updated whenever something material changes. I just asked Claude "where are we ?" and got back stuff like:

The ## Still-open detail section lists two items:

- Task #1070: the ported back end doesn't fold offsets into vector loads, so it emits an extra add on 11 files (from 892) at -O3. The output is correct, just longer.

- Task #1080: array sizes must constant-fold. For example, u8 buf[EVSZ * MAXEV] is rejected because size expressions only accept a literal.

This is for 'xc' [1] - a compiler for an Objective-C-like language (but without the excessive []). The language has ARC, blocks and bound-functions/methods named 'block' and 'callback', automatic parsing of DWARF data so you can #use a shared-object, so there's no header files - just read enums/types/functions/methods from the shared object. It's a cross-compiler, runs on mac,windows,linux and creates executables for mac,windows,linux,ios,android,WASM (amongst others). I have a binary running on my iPhone which was written on, and signed on a Linux box - no Apple software used at all. Oh, and it produces code that is very comparable to clang in speed on both arm64 and x86_64.

You can appreciate it's a reasonably large project. It's taken actual months(!) [grin] for me to get working. Months! There's no way I'd approach a problem like this without detailed plans of what I wanted the language to do, where we were going with it

FWIW, "I" wrote blewit.net [2] entirely in xc - both the server back-end (#use <psql> was very useful for binding to Postgres) and the WASM client - which share classes between client and back end, to make it very difficult to get out-of-step between them. No Apache (#use <tls>), no scripting, just a lean-and-mean daemon talking to postgres via valkey (#use <valkey>) - a reddis-alike. Oh yeah, blewit.net has a plan too. Actually it has lots of planning :)

1: https://compile-xc.org/compiler/

2: https://blewit.net/