I generally only work with the default claude auto and see that it does pretty well for my needs

I would have assumed plan modes make use of tools to keep the goal/plan persistent across compaction etc. Is that not the case?

i disagree, i think it is very useful to have the ability to ask anything about the code and have the confidence that it WONT execute supid stuff

Ironically enough Google Antigravity added plan mode this week.

> While the ease of generating code this way triggered a greater dopamine reward

I get zero dopamine rush from this. I get a dopamine rush from building something or figuring something out myself. I don't get a dopamine rush for generating thousands of lines of code that I then have to try to understand.

I totally disagree. This perspective only works if you don't care about token cost.

I'm using Astra for some homelab work and I tell it I want to do something and then it burns through a giant percentage of my 5-hour allowance (on the £20/mo subscription) doing that in a really weird way. I've had to tell it to stop zooming off and doing things, calling loads of tools and looking up websites, and just have a quick conversation first. It's much better now, but I've basically just reimplemented plan mode via AGENTS.md.

Cool article from a cool founder. Her other posts are great.

Why is a plan "mode" needed? I really hate reading plans in conversation UI. One line in AGENTS.md is always better, and you can customize it to fit your document convention. From the communication perspective, the planning process is most about creating clarity and alignment, on things like scope, constraints and decisions, among people (and agents now), often requiring multiple rounds. The planning tool built in Codex or Claude Code is not persisted, version-controlled, nor well accessible. In practice, My AGENTS.md contains an instruction about writing a document before starting implementation. Usually I won't read that document, because I don't want to micromanage agents. That document mostly serves a historical purpose like ADR, helping me find out what agents missed, made mistakes on or misaligned on, if needed.

In other news, Antigravity (the one that isn't the IDE or CLI) just added plan mode: https://x.com/antigravity/status/2103611698800140697

i find astra's every other message is a small plan, and i have to confirm for it to go