[I work on Claude Code] I broadly agree with the author’s point: 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”. It’s something I came up with late on a Sunday night many months ago, when I got tired of asking Claude to plan with me first before coding in each new session. Something people might not realize is plan mode has always been a prompt — it has never changed the toolset because doing so would break the prompt cache, and so would be expensive for users.

This worked well for a while, until a few months ago, using early versions of Fable, I realized that I wasn’t using plan mode anymore because the model just got it, and because for the increasingly complex work I asked the model to do, planning had become interactive and iterative. With Opus 5.5, I feel Opus has gotten to that point too.

For codebase understanding, I sometimes ask Claude to generate an artifact that explains some aspect of its changes. For complex diffs to core parts of the system, I will often ask it to make diagrams or even interactive demos so I can better understand the change and alternatives considered. I don’t do this very often, but it’s a useful way to explain code when you need it. I ask Claude to attach these artifacts to its PRs also, so others can understand and future Claudes have the context.

I only really used it because the harness was way too trigger happy to start making changes. Even if I just asked a question some times I would come back and it refactored the whole codebase. Now it doesn't seem to do that any more.

I still would appreciate a "read-only" mode. It's not uncommon that I start a harness ONLY to explore and understand the code and I don't really want one typo to have it off building something, or even to save a plan document.

I'm actively watching understanding slip away from developers, code review getting paired down to no comment checkmarks, and codebases go to bloated messes that nobody can read. Axioms like engineers must understand and take responsibility for the code they ship are getting torn down, and the products coming out are reflecting conway's law, becoming impenetrably obtuse and always "so complex there are no obvious deficiencies" (as opposed to "so simple there are no obvious deficiencies" which used to be the aim).

The one thing plan mode helped is for the humans to get an understanding of the strategy, and be able to poke around and look at the design and architecture. You can achieve this with some self discipline and keeping shorter leashes on agents, but it feels like a losing battle. The best devs still put out good code, but the poor devs are learning nothing while their metrics look great. I can't help but think we are racking up immense amounts of debt that will very soon become due.

I'm probably just behind the curve, but I still use plan mode quite a bit in Claude Code. I iterate on the plan repeatedly until it largely agrees with what I want. Once it seems good I ask it to build the plan and open a PR when done.

My only critic of the plan mode is I wish it was easier to see the updates and changes easily in Claude Code as we iterate on the plan. It is wasteful to have to remember what parts I have reviewed and what parts are new (and need another pass). I have thought about fixing this but I also feel the review is the actual thinking (even if ineficient), and so I purposely have not removed it.

When I draft my idea for the implementation of a feature or bug fix, I don't even trust a _human_ to understand what I mean the first time. There are _always_ either errors on my part, or erroneous assumptions on theirs. Everything from "this accounts for X and Y, but not Z which breaks the whole thing" to "this part of the idea directly contradicts what with you said earlier, what do you want to do about it?"

I can't bring myself to trust that an LLM understands what I mean better than any human would, no matter how "good" people claim they are getting.

TFA seems to be advocating for regular old vibecoding. Code now and ask questions later. Which is their choice, and is perhaps even a valid choice in many cases. But at least call it what it is.

The real reason why plan mode is dead is because you can just conversationally instruct the agent to not make changes to the repository or to make changes to selected documents only, and it will listen. There was a time when we needed to enforce this via selected tool use, but we have surpassed that.

Claude code’s plan mode began its slow march towards deprecation when they hid the “clear context and implement” option behind a flag. From the discussion at that time it seemed that the developers considered it mostly a legacy feature, and that newer models are smart enough in long context not to need it.

Disagree. While it's easier to 1-shot more things now, when there's more complicated interaction of components, a good plan from plan mode can make the project a "looks good, go" and run overnight thing vs. "steering" needed.

Lately, I've been using Matt Pocock's “/grill-me” skill more and more, rather than plan mode or a complex, spec-driven set of skills. I made a personal fork of the skill to use Claude’s ask tool, which has a nicer UX.

I used plan mode for two reasons: to review the choices before execution, and to execute with another model (i.e., using the barely documented opusplan feature).

The grill-me skill is much better for reviewing and clarifying choices (and modifying it to use the ask tool makes you go faster). Instead of opusplan, you can explicitly tell Claude to start a subagent with another model to divide the tasks.

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.

I use Claude's Plan mode daily and it's great. I almost always have feedback to refine the plan and I want a clean separation of planning time before writing code. I don't get what the problem is.

I also find this "kill Plan mode" push on Twitter odd, because developers have been complaining about AI supposedly killing their jobs, yet they want to take away the main feature that lets them be an active collaborator and participator in the process. Weird.

I'm going through the same problem right now

Qwen 3.8 27b is the supervisor

Qwen 3.5 4b are the 6-15 minions it controls

Gemma 4 e4b is the validator for the supervisor.

A plan means it preps all work for the agents up front, tests that evals work, makes sure the dev environment is right for each agent, then finds and fixes each before the distributed tasks even begin.

What I thought would take minutes took hours as a supervisor or one agent did the prep / pre flight work.

My solution so far has been to drop all but basic setup and force the supervisor to ask before every op - if this is not the design choices, can this be run in parallel? If so, hand it off NOW.

I'm still iterating this workflow, but less setup for all the minions plus handing them work that may be incomplete/ broken is caught and fixed by the minion and its own qa gates.

This can mean a number of minions end up replicating the same fixes, but in general the time cost of that is small Vs the supervisor working in parallel instead of too sequentially.

Yes, a conversation can be the plan. It helps if you ask it what the commits will be and then tell it to use subagents to implement them.

Also, since sometimes an AI can be a busy beaver, I added instructions to not edit any checked-in files if the prompt contains a question.

Plan mode isn’t that useful but planning is, I never used it much, but in the agent build mode, I lay down the specs, the architecture, and everything I can think of, and I ask the agent to make the blueprint with the specs that will be used throughout the project, I review them, make the needed edits and revisions, then code and review follow. This is good because you can use the blueprint in any other model or agent, even humans can read it and understand it, sure, sometimes it gets overly verbose but it’s better than nothing.

I'd like a brainstorming mode, with limited side effects.

I want it to go and read stuff but also invoke some commands and generate reports and discuss on the results. Latest GPTs in codex plan mode always go.. write a plan. Shocking, i know, but thats not what i want on every turn when im in that mode.

The second I discovered the plan start hook I hijacked it and replaced the built-in planner with my own. The built-in planner is useless.

> This cut-and-paste workflow felt clunky and made it arduous to work through an idea while keeping track of the current plan.

I mean, it is, and if that were the workflow I’d be very fed up of it by now, but the plan mode in Claude’s VS Code extension has supported select and annotate directly since at the very least early 2026.

I can't speak for Claude, but in Codex, plan mode is very useful for finding serious issues with one's spec. I use it to improve my spec. I keep rerunning plan mode over my updated spec until it stops finding issues. It is only then that I execute the spec.

[flagged]