Commenter identifies successor to plan mode: real-time state visualization
6 Yesterday 12:46 AM · 1d ago · 8 comments · 1 source · development 6 of 6
A developer argued the real problem is that LLM harnesses lack visibility into system state as work proceeds. Rather than planning upfront, the next tool should automatically provide developers with simple diagrams and status summaries, allowing them to verify progress without manual prompting.
“IMO the current successor to plan mode should be the harness knowing when to tell the use "ok here's our overall current state in a simple diagram", auromatically”
zobzuAyman Nadeem Developer, founder of NuancedBen Cherny Claude Code developer at Anthropicbcherny Anthropic team member
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What people said 24 voices · best of 71 · verbatim
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For an adhd mind that serial interface is a bless and hell at the same time. Great for the detailed planning discussion, bad for checking the results.I am currently working on canvas-based interfaces for that reason and i would think the only way to really create value here is with a deep independent analysis and visualization of the changes…
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Plan mode is dead: https://www. aymannadeem.com/artificial/int elligence,/developer/tools/2026/09/24/plan-mode-is-dead.html Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9840054
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I still rely heavily on plan modes, first to think through product design from the 3-sentence descriptions handed to me as super-complex feature requests, and second to implement the technical requirements I want to build. Way before AI, I think the first idea, while sparked by inspiration, has always created a local minimum and suggested that…
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So my Claude Code workflow for a ticket is:* Scoping discussion - do research and figure out approach (auto mode)* Planning - take the scoping and convert it to a concrete plan for review (plan mode)* Implementation - put the plan into action (auto mode)I find this works really well for my workflow, and it is really easy to trigger each phase…
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Fascinating piece, puts in words what I've been feeling for a while..Over time I found some useful patterns (indeed after not getting what I want from plan mode), but this piece convinced me to double down on them and always try to find (and let the LLM construct) clarifying abstractions that have a deterministic relation to the code.2 examples I…
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What I do nowadays, for large changes, is have Fable create a HTML explainer for what we're gonna do with code snippets, which is not that fat from plan mode only much more convenient for me and modern models have no issue using that HTML artifact as the source of truth, and then before I get into execution - I interactively build an end to end…
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I once tried to build something similar to your product on top of Codex, and I failed.But my conclusion on plan mode is slightly different. I agree that plan mode itself may be a dead end, but I still believe there might be another way to achieve the same goal.When I was building my product, I found that the biggest issue wasn't capability, but…
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Maybe, I always say "let's write a plan and refine it" which ends up being a nice rubber duck session to keep claude and friends from going off the rails implementing things like privacy or encryption or some other rabbit hole when I just need it to do a few features at a time so I can review while it starts the next few things. Maybe this is…
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So planning is tied to the spec. This much is clear.What the author I think is hinting at is not planning alone but "the development and evolution of any program and the state of this program throughout the planning, elaboration, and eventual runtime".I chuckle at the thought that throwing an md file or a prompt at this problem is sufficient.So, I…
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> In Claude Code, all plan mode does is add a little reminder to every user messageI was quite surprised when I learned this (when Claude Code edited a file despite being in plan mode). I had previously assumed "plan mode" was a harness level concern, and restricted what tools could be used. I didn't expect that it was simply an addendum to the…
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Good to hear, this is my experience also:I haven't reached for Plan Mode in awhile--maybe, on some blank folder/canvas and I just want that cute "questionnaire" DX to get me going...But on the whole, CC is smart enough to know when to "rush off and act" and when to "pushback", which is great--and it's no big deal to tell it to pause/stop by adding…
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I still find plans to be useful for big changes. I first ask to create a plan for the specific feature i have in mind. Then i ask for a second round of research with the current project in mind. Then i ask if it can make improvements on the plan. Then i read the plan and note issues down and let it correct them.In my experience the problem with…
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Anecdotally, in the Opus 4.6 days, it felt like there was something special about using plan mode to discover the approach then clearing the context to execute on it.A mixture of defending against a disastrous mid-implementation compaction (where suddenly things would veer off the rails) and also allowing the fresh execution to double-check the…
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Yeah I think this is a natural consequence of longer task horizons. When I was chaining 4h tasks, I can mostly plan them up front.Now that I’m frequently designing and delegating day/week scale features, the flow has to change; having the agent go off and build a spike can be a quicker way of us understanding the design space and constraints…
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I can’t imagine working without a plan first.Firstly I find it’s an excellent way for me to get very good clarity about what will be built and whether it’s going to be done in a sensible way.Very often I don’t really know what the work will need to look like until I’ve explored the problem with the LLM towards first making the plan.Without a plan…
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For me he plan mode is as useful as ever, even though I understand this is just a prompt. For large changes there are few problems exist such as context window limit and compaction, and even though models got better these are still detrimental to models performance. I found making one large high level plan and then splitting it into N plans…
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I have been using this super simple skill[0] to make Claude ask exhaustive questions about the implementation of larger features. It has been absolutely amazing and felt like a step change in the output quality.For complex features there can be 10 or more questions but I have a very strong sense of understanding the changes about to be made and…
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At work, we use Claude Code with superpowers which organizes most work into planning followed by review followed by implementation and superpowers applies a fairly high level of scrutiny at every step. It's really quite effective, I don't generally read the code that comes out. In that workflow I have never used plan mode. I don't know what I'd…
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I get the idea here, but I find planning very useful as a phase when I'm doing things I am not intimately familiar with (e.g. AppKit programming).That's when I need to learn about implied patterns, do's and don'ts; not from theory but in the context of my own project. Unfortunately, the model tends to keep implicit knowledge implicit. But I can…
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Plan mode is critical in the beginning, because there's a lot of long tail decisions that haven't been considered, let alone resolved.But as skills and memory are populated over time, Plan mode isn't as necessary. It becomes simpler to let Claude just build and get something general in place that works, and then refine from there. Auto mode will…
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YES, and I also find that plan mode incentivizes bad practices and results in steadily reduced thought. On bad practices, I refer to zero/one-shot big bangs over iterative features/bugfixes. On reduced thought, assuming the plan was sufficiently comprehensive because it seemed to ask reasonable questions.It can still be used in ways that I…
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I still use plan mode. I use it for large features that I haven't fully thought out. Which I guess is like the author's "planning" phase. But I don't see the issue with using plan mode for planning. I welcome the agent to ask me for questions and clarifications. Do I read the full spec it produces at the end? Usually not. Usually the agent is…
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Plan mode is "dead" because most plans are actually generated prompts to steer agents to keep doing the next thing, in hope they keep doing the right thing until the end. Real life is not so elegant and straightforward, you have a lot of "nah, screw that decision".It is more useful to capture the motivation of the "plans" and their…
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I will try to update this repositorysoon, but I had to stop because the ahem compatibility failure of Claude Code env features; observer; agent workflow message passing LACKING on installed marketplace pluginsI am still actively working on thesis : a self-directed plan mode to generate artifacts that can go through multiple evaluations of…
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