> This worked well for a while, until a few months ago, using early versions of Fable, I realized that I wasn’t using plan mode anymore because the model just got it, and because for the increasingly complex work I asked the model to do, planning had become interactive and iterative. With Opus 5.5, I feel Opus has gotten to that point too.

For me it’s actually the opposite, and Claude Code’s plan mode isn’t nearly sufficient. Personally I ask Claude to write down a markdown file with its plan, then review the plan using plannotator, and then go back and forth (most of the time it’s actually the comments that are the problem, not the code).

Then start a fresh session, seed it with the plan, tell Claude to find ambiguities / friction points / oversights, resolve those, and then implement it.

Review once again with plannotator, go back and forth, and then send PR.

Maybe not the “vibe coding” that was once imagined, but this does ensure I am fully aware of the code and architecture, the quality, and this also prevents long term degradation.

Yeah, sure, but you don't need a dedicated plan mode for that at all. you can just do it in auto mode, and say "let's do some planning first", and Claude will (nowadays) be smart enough to understand that it's not supposed to jump straight into the implementation.

So again: You don't need plan mode, auto mode works just fine, there is no difference in the workflows here.

I do the same, I don't use Claude Code or Codex planning because it is mostly pointless, even with Fable/Astra. I just have multiple agents work on a markdown file which I manually perfect, often breaking into multiple different files for large features or PRs. I also create design 'handoff' documents which I feed into Claude Design or Astra along with screenshots and wireframes. By the time an agent does something I'm well prepared.

I've tried doing the incremental, iterative approach with just Code and it's just not as effective unless you're working on something simple or experimental. Or you're shipping to something non-serious or perpetually beta.

There is a popular skill for this kind of workflows: https://github.com/obra/superpowers