Debate emerges over whether plan mode drawbacks are design flaws
4 Sep 25 10:02 PM · 1d ago · 6 comments · 1 source · development 4 of 6
Commenters disputed whether plan mode's limitations stem from models improving or from poor implementation. Some argued plan mode still helps stabilize complex workflows and catch errors, while others said the tool lacks features (like read-only command execution or proper change diffing) that would make it effective.
“seems like plan mode could turn off some tools, even if it doesn't change the set offered to the model…isn't the right way to know if plan mode helps or not, to run an experiment? we're all guessing unless we have data”
bionhowardAyman Nadeem Developer, founder of NuancedBen Cherny Claude Code developer at Anthropicbcherny Anthropic team member
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What people said 6 voices · verbatim
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> 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…
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> plan mode has always been a prompt — it has never changed the toolset because doing so would break the prompt cache, and so would be expensiveseems like plan mode could turn off some tools, even if it doesn't change the set offered to the model, the ones that they have which would mutate your codebase could just not work with an error message…
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For me the most useful thing about plan mode in Claude or Codex is not the plan, I usually barely read it, it's that it forces models to gather as much context as possible before implementing. Without plan mode models tend to implement wrong solutions because they are reading not enough context before writing code.Of course this can be done with…
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I still like plan mode in my harness because I restrict it's tool use so it can't go rogue and write documents outside of a specific folder. In my case it is /agile which contains a roadmap.md with epic1.md through is many epics as needed for the full vision. Then I often have one chat session per thread. If multiple agents take a sprint or a card…
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I find a lot of value in using plan mode to get the LLM out of dead ends. If it's in Act and starting to spiral (evidence of looking for something or trying to better understand something), I'll kick into Plan and tell it to think a bit harder—also avoids it wasting tokens retrying the same techniques—which results in a much more considered, and…
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Still working on and with this but had to move it private because marketplace installed plugins loose capability
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