There are a few prompt frameworks that essentially codify these types of workflows by adding skills and prompts
https://github.com/obra/superpowers https://github.com/jlevy/tbd
How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
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Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the well defined failure modes for AI agents/models is "laziness." Yes, models can be "lazy" and that is an actual term used when reviewing them. I am not sure if we know why really, but they are that way and you need to explicitly prompt around it.
I've encountered this failure mode, and the opposite of it: thinking too much. A behaviour I've come to see as some sort of pseudo-neuroticism. Lazy thinking makes LLMs do surface analysis and then produce things that are wrong. Neurotic thinking will see them over-analyze, and then repeatedly second-guess themselves, repeatedly re-derive conclusions. Something very similar to an anxiety loop in humans, where problem…
yeah i experienced this the other day when asking claude code to build an http proxy using an afsk modem software to communicate over the computers sound card. it had an absolute fit tuning the system and would loop for hours trying and doubling back. eventually after some change in prompt direction to think more deeply and test more comprehensively it figured it out. i certainly had no idea how to build a afsk modem.
Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#103Wow, I never bother with using phrases like “deeply study this codebase deeply.” I consistently get pretty fantastic results.
Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#104I go a bit further than this and have had great success with 3 doc types and 2 skills: - Specs: these are generally static, but updatable as the project evolves. And they're broken out to an index file that gives a project overview, a high-level arch file, and files for all the main modules. Roughly ~1k lines of spec for 10k lines of code, and try to limit any particular spec file to 300 lines. I'm intimately familia…
This is pretty much my approach. I started with some spec files for a project I'm working on right now, based on some academic papers I've written. I ended up going back and forth with Claude, building plans, pushing info back into the specs, expanding that out and I ended up with multiple spec/architecture/module documents. I got to the point where I ended up building my own system (using claude) to capture and generate artifacts, in more of a systems engineering style (e.g. following IEEE standards for conops, requirement documents, software definitions, test plans...). I don't use that for session-level planning; Claude's tools work fine for that. (I like superpowers, so far. It hasn't seemed too much)
I have found it to work very well with Claude by giving it context and guardrails. Basically I just tell it "follow the guidance docs" and it does. Couple that with intense testing and self-feedback mechanisms and you can easily keep Claude on track.
I have had the same experience with Codex and Claude as you in terms of token usage. But I haven't been happy with my Codex usage; Claude just feels like it's doing more of what I want in the way I want.
Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#105> Notice the language: “deeply”, “in great details”, “intricacies”, “go through everything”. This isn’t fluff. Without these words, Claude will skim. It’ll read a file, see what a function does at the signature level, and move on. You need to signal that surface-level reading is not acceptable. This makes no sense to my intuition of how an LLM works. It's not that I don't believe this works, but my mental model doesn…
Maybe the training data that included the words like "skim" also provided shallower analysis than training that was close to the words "in great detail", so the LLM is just reproducing those respective words distribution when prompted with directions to do either.
Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#106> Notice the language: “deeply”, “in great details”, “intricacies”, “go through everything”. This isn’t fluff. Without these words, Claude will skim. It’ll read a file, see what a function does at the signature level, and move on. You need to signal that surface-level reading is not acceptable. This makes no sense to my intuition of how an LLM works. It's not that I don't believe this works, but my mental model doesn…
How anybody can read stuff like this and still take all this seriously is beyond me. This is becoming the engineering equivalent of astrology.
Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn’t slower. I use my personal ChatGPT subscriptions with Codex for almost everything at work and use my $800/month company Claude allowance only for the tricky stuff that Codex can’t figure out. It’s never application code. It’s usually some combination of app code + Docker + AWS issue with my underlying infrastructure - created with whatever IAC that I’m using for a client - Terraform/CloudFormation or the CDK.…
> and use my $800/month company Claude allowance only for the tricky stuff that Codex can’t figure out. It doesn’t seem controversial that the model that can solve more complex problems (that you admit the cheaper model can’t solve) costs more. For the things I use it for, I’ve not found any other model to be worth it.
You’re assuming rational behavior from a company that doesn’t care about losing billions of dollar.
Have you tried Codex with OpenAi’s latest models?
Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#108my rlm-workflow skill has this encoded as a repeatable workflow.
give it a try: https://skills.sh/doubleuuser/rlm-workflow/rlm-workflow
Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#109> Notice the language: “deeply”, “in great details”, “intricacies”, “go through everything”. This isn’t fluff. Without these words, Claude will skim. It’ll read a file, see what a function does at the signature level, and move on. You need to signal that surface-level reading is not acceptable. This makes no sense to my intuition of how an LLM works. It's not that I don't believe this works, but my mental model doesn…
The LLM will do what you ask it to unless you don't get nuanced about it. Myself and others have noticed that LLM's work better when your codebase is not full of code smells like massive godclass files, if your codebase is discrete and broken up in a way that makes sense, and fits in your head, it will fit in the models head.
Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution
#110I use Claude Code for lecture prep. I craft a detailed and ordered set of lecture notes in a Quarto file and then have a dedicated claude code skill for translating those notes into Slidev slides, in the style that I like. Once that's done, much like the author, I go through the slides and make commented annotations like "this should be broken into two slides" or "this should be a side-by-side" or "use your generate…
Can I ask how you annotate the feedback for it? Just with inline comments like `# This should be changed to X`? The author mentions annotations but doesn't go into detail about how to feed the annotations to Claude.
Slidev is markdown, so i do it in html comments. Usually something like: