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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

#211
post #16

This is what I do with the obra/superpowers[0] set of skills. 1. Use brainstorming to come up with the plan using the Socratic method 2. Write a high level design plan to file 3. I review the design plan 4. Write an implementation plan to file. We've already discussed this in detail, so usually it just needs skimming. 5. Use the worktree skill with subagent driven development skill 6. Agent does the work using subage…

The crowd around this pot shows how superficial is knowledge about claude code. It gets releases each day and most of this is already built in the vanilla version. Not to mention subagent working in work trees, memory.md, plan on which you can comment directly from the interface, subagents launched in research phase, but also some basic mcp's like LSP/IDE integration, and context7 to not to be stuck in the knowledge cutoff/past.

When you go to YouTube and search for stuff like "7 levels of claude code" this post would be maybe 3-4.

Oh, one more thing - quality is not consistent, so be ready for 2-3 rounds of "are you happy with the code you wrote" and defining audit skills crafted for your application domain - like for example RODO/Compliance audit etc.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But we can predict the outcomes, though. That's what we're saying, and it's true. Maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe it helps a significant amount of the time and that's what matters.

Is it engineering? Maybe not. But neither is knowing how to talk to junior developers so they're productive and don't feel bad. The engineering is at other levels.

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

#214
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…

if it’s so smart, why do i need to learn to use it?

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actively use LLMs to do semi-complex coding work? Because if not, it will sound mumbo-jumbo to you. Everyone else can nod along and read on, as they’ve experienced all of it first hand.

You've missed the point. This isn't engineering, it's gambling. You could take the exact same documents, prompts, and whatever other bullshit, run it on the exact same agent backed by the exact same model, and get different results every single time. Just like you can roll dice the exact same way on the exact same table and you'll get two totally different results. People are doing their best to constrain that behavi…

> You could take the exact same documents, prompts, and whatever other bullshit, run it on the exact same agent backed by the exact same model, and get different results every single time

This is more of an implementation detail/done this way to get better results. A neural network with fixed weights (and deterministic floating point operations) returning a probability distribution, where you use a pseudorandom generator with a fixed seed called recursively will always return the same output for the same input.

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

#216
This is quite close to what I've arrived at, but with two modifications

1) anything larger I work on in layers of docs. Architecture and requirements -> design -> implementation plan -> code. Partly it helps me think and nail the larger things first, and partly helps claude. Iterate on each level until I'm satisfied.

2) when doing reviews of each doc I sometimes restart the session and clear context, it often finds new issues and things to clear up before starting the next phase.

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

#217
post #29
post #9

This all looks fine for someone who can't code, but for anyone with even a moderate amount of experience as a developer all this planning and checking and prompting and orchestrating is far more work than just writing the code yourself. There's no winner for "least amount of code written regardless of productivity outcomes.", except for maybe Anthropic's bank account.

I partly agree with you. But once you have a codebase large enough, the changes become longer to even type in, once figured out. I find the best way to use agents (and I don't use claude) is to hash it out like I'm about to write these changes and I make my own mental notes, and get the agent to execute on it. Agents don't get tired, they don't start fat fingering stuff at 4pm, the quality doesn't suffer. And they ca…

I think it comes down to "it depends". I work in a NIS2 regulated field and we're quite callenged by the fact that it means we can't give AI's any sort of real access because of the security risk. To be complaint we'd have to have the AI agent ask permission for every single thing it does, before it does it, and foureye review it. Which is obviously never going to happen. We can discuss how bad the NIS2 foureye requirement works in the real world another time, but considering how easy it is to break AI security, it might not be something we can actually ever use. This makes sense on some of the stuff we work on, since it could bring an entire powerplant down. On the flip-side AI risks would be of little concern on a lot of our internal tools, which are basically non-regulated and unimportant enough that they can be down for a while without costing the business anything beyond annoyances.

This is where our challenges are. We've build our own chatbot where you can "build" your own agent within the librechat framework and add a "skill" to it. I say "skill" because it's older than claude skills but does exactly the same. I don't completely buy the authors:

> “deeply”, “in great details”, “intricacies”, “go through everything”

bit, but you can obviously save a lot of time by writing a piece of english which tells it what sort of environment you work in. It'll know that when I write Python I use UV, Ruff and Pyrefly and so on as an example. I personally also have a "skill" setting that tells the AI not to compliment me because I find that ridicilously annoying, and that certainly works. So who knows? Anyway, employees are going to want more. I've been doing some PoC's running open source models in isolation on a raspberry pi (we had spares because we use them in IoT projects) but it's hard to setup an isolation policy which can't be circumvented.

We'll have to figure it out though. For powerplant critical projects we don't want to use AI. But for the web tool that allows a couple of employees to upload three excel files from an external accountant and then generate some sort of report on them? Who cares who writes it or even what sort of quality it's written with? The lifecycle of that tool will probably be something that never changes until the external account does and then the tool dies. Not that it would have necessarily been written in worse quality without AI... I mean... Have you seen some of the stuff we've written in the past 40 years?

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

#218
> the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools

This looks exactly like what anthropic recommends as the best practice for using Claude Code. Textbook.

It also exposes a major downside of this approach: if you don't plan perfectly, you'll have to start over from scratch if anything goes wrong.

I've found a much better approach in doing a design -> plan -> execute in batches, where the plan is no more than 1,500 lines, used as a proxy for complexity.

My 30,000 LOC app has about 100,000 lines of plan behind it. Can't build something that big as a one-shot.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand why there are so many comments like this. Yesterday I had Claude write an audit logging feature to track all changes made to entities in my app. Yeah you get this for free with many frameworks, but my company's custom setup doesn't have it. It took maybe 5-10 minutes of wall-time to come up with a good plan, and then ~20-30 min for Claude implement, test, etc. That would've taken me at least…

I mean, all I can really say is... if writing some logging takes you one or two days, are you sure you _really_ know how to code?

Well someone who says logging is easy never knows the difficulty of deciding "what" to log. And audit log is different beast altogether than normal logging

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

#220

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 tha…

Same, I formalized a similar workflow for my team (oriented around feature requirement docs), I am thinking about fully productizing it and am looking to for feedback - https://acai.sh

Even if the product doesn’t resonate I think I’ve stumbled on some ideas you might find useful^

I do think spec-driven development is where this all goes. Still making up my mind though.

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