Anthropic's Claude Code developer agrees plan mode is obsolete
1 Sep 25 6:43 PM · 2d ago · 1 article · 2 posts · 5 comments · 3 sources · development 1 of 6
Ben Cherny, who works on Claude Code at Anthropic, responded to the essay agreeing that plan mode has become less useful. He revealed that in Claude Code, plan mode is merely a text reminder to not code yet—never a change to the toolset—implemented late one night and kept for simplicity's sake.
“I broadly agree with the author's point: plan mode was useful, and is no longer useful.”
bchernyAyman Nadeem Developer, founder of NuancedBen Cherny Claude Code developer at Anthropicbcherny Anthropic team member
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What was reported 1 claim about this development
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2 outlets Plan mode is dead
first by HN Frontpage, 2d ago · also HN Best
What people said 6 voices · verbatim
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[I work on Claude Code] I broadly agree with the author’s point: plan mode was useful, and is no longer useful.In Claude Code, all plan mode does is add a little reminder to every user message along the lines of “you’re in plan mode, please don’t code yet”. It’s something I came up with late on a Sunday night many months ago, when I got tired of…
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Plan mode is dead L: https://www. aymannadeem.com/artificial/int elligence,/developer/tools/2026/09/24/plan-mode-is-dead.html C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9840054 posted on 2026.09.24 at 23:59:11 (c=3, p=9)
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Claude code’s plan mode began its slow march towards deprecation when they hid the “clear context and implement” option behind a flag. From the discussion at that time it seemed that the developers considered it mostly a legacy feature, and that newer models are smart enough in long context not to need it.
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The real reason why plan mode is dead is because you can just conversationally instruct the agent to not make changes to the repository or to make changes to selected documents only, and it will listen. There was a time when we needed to enforce this via selected tool use, but we have surpassed that.
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Disagree. While it's easier to 1-shot more things now, when there's more complicated interaction of components, a good plan from plan mode can make the project a "looks good, go" and run overnight thing vs. "steering" needed.
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It's useful because it let's me see the decisions the model will make before it wastes a ton of time implementing them. The model is smarter now but that doesn't solve for underspecification if it guesses my intent wrong
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