Plan mode is still very useful to me, I just need to read the plan. Even if the model is smarter than me, it’s still working on my project, and thus I need to keep a mental view of the system. My solution has been to ask the assistant for far less than it can do and leave for myself a bigger bunch of the work, so that I’m forced to keep myself up to date on the project. Yeah I’m leaving productivity on the table but… am I really?

It is? I still found it invaluable, when having a lot of externally managed knowledge. Basically the only gate before it goes on a certain failure, when dealing with proprietary libraries, tools and services

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 plans is that llms (at least gpt and claude) are really lazy and will stop at the first solution without even understanding your project. I had plans that wanted to add a few thousand lines of code just to support a very minimal part of a feature. After asking for a second round of research with the project specific limitations in mind it recommended a very small change to the existing codebase that did the same thing.

This is probably also the reason why most llm generated code stacks thousands of lines of code.

Planning largely doesn't work because it's extrapolation. You don't know for sure how that remote system or compiler will react to the proposed change until it actually occurs.

Execution is the answer. All the complex success stories I've seen involved the LLM iteratively probing live data sources with varying filters, throwing code changes at the compiler over and over, or invoking shell commands until it succeeds.

I believe there is a Yoda quote regarding this.

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 often gets things wrong operating that way (depending on how detailed the context ends up being).

For example, the ability for the harness to call into a Python one-liner just to experiment is pretty powerful. If I'm asking it to use D2 to build an SVG graph, it can write some Python to introspect the XML to see if things appear to be placed correctly (size, x-y coords, etc.). Which is a pretty cheap way for it to experiment and verify its results before I deign to examine the rendered SVG with my own eye balls.

Plan mode is for me not the agent.

I also bounce around to lots of different models. Some are cheap and dumb, some not. When unfamiliar with a model, the last thing I want it to allow file edits and destructive tool calls. Having a mode explicitly for that is helpful.

I disagree that more intelligent models make plan mode no longer useful. Even with superhuman AI, I would still like to iterate on a plan and understand all the important decisions before changing the code. AI cannot read minds, no matter how intelligent it is. Hell, often I don't even know exactly what I want before the planning phase is finished.

And yes, you can say that I can do this without an explicit plan mode.. But it's such a useful and common workflow that it deserves a special mode, IMHO.

I've been using superpowers:brainstorming skill with claude for a while and have found the process to work well for me. I generally spend 10-30 minutes typing my requirements and ideas for a feature and then I feed it into brainstorming skill which asks questions to fill in the gaps before starting to build things. I don't bother reading the spec it creates. I have been consistently happy with the results.

However, since everything changes every 5-minutes now; I am curious what is now a better process than using superpowers? What works for you?

I use plan mode for anything that touches more than 2-3 files because I want to know what code will be added beforehand.

I guess people don't even look at code anymore

I like writing spec files exclusively by hand and just asking the agent to surface questions about it, which I then clarify by editing the spec file further by hand. It keeps the spec file more manageable than having the agent generate the spec file from your conversation.