Developers defend plan mode for error-catching and code review
5 Sep 25 10:15 PM · 1d ago · 1 post · 10 comments · 2 sources · development 5 of 6
Several commenters pushed back on the essay's conclusions, arguing plan mode remains valuable as a checkpoint for catching bugs and for multi-agent review workflows. Others noted that as task complexity and scope grow, iterative development with intermediate code spikes may replace detailed upfront planning entirely.
“Get a second agent to look at what will be implemented and check it for inconsistencies…It surfaces a large number of opportunities for refinement.”
BockitAyman Nadeem Developer, founder of NuancedBen Cherny Claude Code developer at Anthropicbcherny Anthropic team member
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What people said 11 voices · verbatim
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I disagree with the assertion that the model gets it. Here’s a practical example I just tried with Fable 5.1. I gave it this prompt: “Write a Go function that can be used to establish secure communication to a remote system using a certificate. Keep it short, single function, and explain how to use it.” The output forced the use of a private key…
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Plan mode is dead Link: https://www. aymannadeem.com/artificial/int elligence,/developer/tools/2026/09/24/plan-mode-is-dead.html Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9840054
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I'm using a set of skills for planning now which does something similar to plan mode but it's creating documentation that later skills reference it while building. It works so much better than anything else I've tried, because it keeps things on track throughout the feature buildout and across different agents/models/tasks. From what I read here…
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> 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"Can't help but think if plan mode isn't useful as you say because it's implementation is lacking in claude code, hypothetically speaking.What I can say is…
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For work, I primarily use Gemini CLI, and the one real awkward part of plan mode is that the harness can't run commands, even exploratory ones. So when I'm giving the harness a task in plan mode, it can't experiment and is either blind or relying on its training data and/or any other context (e.g. source code, documentation) I give it. And it…
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I don’t agree. I think the way maybe the author used planning to maintain an understanding of the changes is largely not necessary, but there are other good use cases.For example, it’s a great hook in the process for agentic review.Get a second agent to look at what will be implemented and check it for inconsistencies, check it against whatever…
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I also noticed this personally. Consider when an agent says"Should I start with the spec, or go straight to building it?Unless you're working on a super crucial piece of engineering, you can probably get away with going straight to building it. Even if something doesn't go the way you intended, I find that it's usually faster to correct the agent…
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I think Plan mode is very useful when building something that needs step by step validation, but also needs a broad strategy before starting.For instance, in games where I work, we often need to manually test work out by playing or by using tools in ways that aren't feasible for the AI to do. In that case, getting the human in the loop between…
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My team has been struggling to understand whether or not we should do "spec-driven" development or not. It makes a lot of sense to me to have one developer iterate with the model/harness to generate a markddown document that is a high-level of what will be implemented, and then have the team PR review it before and agent attempts to do the actual…
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My problem with planning and having the models ask the user questions is that the questions the models ask are still often irrelevant: you’ll find yourself answering a bunch of questions like “Should I use the existing system or create a whole new one in a different language?” - yet it will then make assumptions about other things that were…
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Hi, thanks for Claude Code. I use it, and it works well. Have you considered changing it so the text comes down from the top of the screen, in green, like The Matrix?
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