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How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

boristane.com

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Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#201

Post by zahlman »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #13
crazygringo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't be knee-jerk dismissive of posts. Absolute nothing about this article looks "LLM-generated style" to me.

I think it was edited with an LLM - the voice flits from human to bot but various tells are present. The heterogeneity of sentence structure is the clearest signal. Here’s an older article from the author from 2024: https://boristane.com/blog/learnings-from-starting-building-...

I also suspect that people who spend too much time reading LLM-produced content and using LLMs end up suffering a kind of brain-rot from the "LLM house style", and start naturally using those idioms in their own writing even if they do it all by hand.

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#202

Post by zahlman »

dimgl wrote: post #28
alexmorgan26 wrote: post #26

[dead]

Pretty sure this entire comment is AI generated.

There has been this really weird flood of new accounts lately that are making these kinds of bot comments with no clear purpose to making them. Maybe it comes from people experimenting with OpenClaw?

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#203

Post by whateveracct »

glerk wrote: post #135
chickensong wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Claude at least, the more recent guidance from Anthropic is to not yell at it. Just clear, calm, and concise instructions.

Yep, with Claude saying "please" and "thank you" actually works. If you build rapport with Claude, you get rewarded with intuition and creativity. Codex, on the other hand, you have to slap it around like a slave gollum and it will do exactly what you tell it to do, no more, no less.

this is psychotic why is this how this works lol

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#204

Post by whateveracct »

trueno wrote: post #77
chickensong wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Claude at least, the more recent guidance from Anthropic is to not yell at it. Just clear, calm, and concise instructions.

wait seriously? lmfao thats hilarious. i definitely treat claude like shit and ive noticed the falloff in results. if there's a source for that i'd love to read about it.

i make claude grovel at my feet and tell me in detail why my code is better than its code

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#205

Post by yaku_brang_ja »

scuff3d wrote: post #146
fragmede wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to run your own tests and see if the magic phrases do or do not influence the output. Have it make a Todo webapp with and without those phrases and see what happens!

That's not how it works. It's not on everyone else to prove claims false, it's on you (or the people who argue any of this had a measurable impact) to prove it actually works. I've seen a bunch of articles like this, and more comments. Nobody I've ever seen has produced any kind of measurable metrics of quality based on one approach vs another. It's all just vibes. Without something quantifiable it's not much better…

These coding agents are literally Language Models. The way you structure your prompting language affect the actual output.

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#207

Post by scuff3d »

guiambros wrote: post #177
scuff3d wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. It's not on everyone else to prove claims false, it's on you (or the people who argue any of this had a measurable impact) to prove it actually works. I've seen a bunch of articles like this, and more comments. Nobody I've ever seen has produced any kind of measurable metrics of quality based on one approach vs another. It's all just vibes. Without something quantifiable it's not much better…

If you read the transformer paper, or get any book on NLP, you will see that this is not magic incantation; it's purely the attention mechanism at work. Or you can just ask Gemini or Claude why these prompts work. But I get the impression from your comment that you have a fixed idea, and you're not really interested in understanding how or why it works. If you think like a hammer, everything will look like a nail.

I know why it works, to varying and unmeasurable degrees of success. Just like if I poke a bull with a sharp stick, I know it's gonna get it's attention. It might choose to run away from me in one of any number of directions, or it might decide to turn around and gore me to death. I can't answer that question with any certainty then you can.

The system is inherently non-deterministic. Just because you can guide it a bit, doesn't mean you can predict outcomes.

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#208

Post by rzmmm »

FuckButtons wrote: post #150
haolez wrote: post #12

> 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…

That’s because it’s superstition. Unless someone can come up with some kind of rigorous statistics on what the effect of this kind of priming is it seems no better than claiming that sacrificing your first born will please the sun god into giving us a bountiful harvest next year. Sure, maybe this supposed deity really is this insecure and needs a jolly good pep talk every time he wakes up. or maybe you’re just suffer…

I think "understand this directory deeply" just gives more focus for the instruction. So it's like "burn more tokens for this phase than you normally would".

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#209

Post by fendy3002 »

zahlman wrote: post #198

> After Claude writes the plan, I open it in my editor and add inline notes directly into the document. These notes correct assumptions, reject approaches, add constraints, or provide domain knowledge that Claude doesn’t have. This is the part that seems most novel compared to what I've heard suggested before. And I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical. Would it not be better to modify what Claude has written directly,…

One reason why I don't do this: even I won't be immune to mistakes. When I fix it with new values or paths, for example, and the one I provided is wrong, it can worsen the future work.

Personally, I like to order claude one more time to update the plan file after I have given annotation, and review it again after. This will ensure (from my understanding) that claude won't treat my annotation as different instructions, thus risking the work being conflicted.

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#210

Post by nerdright »

Haha this is surprisingly and exactly how I use claude as well. Quite fascinating that we independently discovered the same workflow.

I maintain two directories: "docs/proposals" (for the research md files) and "docs/plans" (for the planning md files). For complex research files, I typically break them down into multiple planning md files so claude can implement one at a time.

A small difference in my workflow is that I use subagents during implementation to avoid context from filling up quickly.

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