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 feel old. These days any new thing I try is dead by the time I actually start using it.

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 use it for.

On my hobby projects I use Antigravity CLI and almost always start with /plan. This is a builtin skill - not a mode. It generates a plan artifact that I review and approve. Once approved the implementation speed is uncanny compared to Claude.

I tried using superpowers with Antigravity CLI but that slowed the agent down considerably without much benefit (plan quality was much worse).

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 recently build while I'm developing a large Django system with a complex datamodel and RBAC (spending quite some time to make it look good):

A script that makes an svg of my data model with all the classes/tables laid out and their relations encoded in the line ends (1 to 1, many to 1, many to many) and their on_delete relations encoded in colors. This also helps me discuss with stakeholders. The visual is also in the README.

For the RBAC model I decided it should be declarative so a TOML in the code that seeds the DB with the roles. I quickly landed on small script that translates the TOML to a markdown table with roles as columns and perms as row. It's also in the README.

After reading this piece I'm going to actively think how I can build these visualization more often and consciously, on different levels. Great realization.

I work on long horizon scientific tasks with expensive computational tools. In that case users are basically asking for the harness to stop and confirm the cost (and plan) before it goes ahead

It's quite interesting. I use blend mode pretty heavily. On both claude code and codex.

But it's no longer to plan a single PR that can be done easily without plan mode.

It is mostly because I am more geared towards having my system work on initiative level changes where it works for days and plan is a good document to maintain to keep the agent aligned with the original goal and avoid unnecessary drift.

I’ve been waiting for some kind of steering mode.

Imagining a mode where the agent is very transparent about its direction and process, and I can passively interject at any time to steer the outcome, without having to wait my turn or hard-interrupt.

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 it serves as a clear unified context for me and the agents to follow and then track what has been done.

With Claude, most tasks do not require discussion, I know exactly what to ask and what approach I want to take but for especially complex functionality with multiple possible options, I will ask it to list the tradeoffs and suggest an approach. It's still kind of 50/50 whether I take its suggestion or not; it's still a bit off in terms of weighing up importance, but it's really good at listing out relevant constraints and tradeoffs. It sometimes misses opportunities but it always sees the tradeoffs and the issues.

In Claude Code it started to feel like it just asks 2 questions and sometimes there isnt really needed 2 questions so the options there often felt like choosing to downgrade or do something actually dumb because it was forced to suggest 2 things.