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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

#251

Post by therealdrag0 »

girvo wrote: post #180
cowlby wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picture like semi conductors; the 5nm process is so absurdly complex that operators can't just peek into the system easily. I imagine I'm just so used to hand crafting code that I can't imagine not being able to peek in. So maybe it's that we won't be reviewing by hand anymore? I.e. it's LLMs all the way down. Trying to embrace that style of development lately as unnatural as it feels. We're obv not 100% there yet…

Then who is responsible when (not if) that code does horrible things? We have humans to blame right now. I just don’t see it happening personally because liability and responsibility are too important

For some software, sure but not most.

And you don’t blame humans anyways lol. Everywhere I’ve worked has had “blameless” postmortems. You don’t remove human review unless you have reasonable alternatives like high test coverage and other automated reviews.

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

#252

Post by stingraycharles »

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 actually have a prompt optimizer skill that does exactly this.

https://github.com/solatis/claude-config

It’s based entirely off academic research, and a LOT of research has been done in this area.

One of the papers you may be interested in is “emotion prompting”, eg “it is super important for me that you do X” etc actually works.

“Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli”

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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

#253

Post by hbarka »

nostrademons wrote: post #85
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…

It's the attention mechanism at work, along with a fair bit of Internet one-up-manship. The LLM has ingested all of the text on the Internet, as well as Github code repositories, pull requests, StackOverflow posts, code reviews, mailing lists, etc. In a number of those content sources, there will be people saying "Actually, if you go into the details of..." or "If you look at the intricacies of the problem" or "If yo…

>> Same reason that "Pretend you are an MIT professor" or "You are a leading Python expert" or similar works in prompts.

This pretend-you-are-a-[persona] is cargo cult prompting at this point. The persona framing is just decoration.

A brief purpose statement describing what the skill [skill.md] does is more honest and just as effective.

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

#254

Post by pgt »

My process is similar, but I recently added a new "critique the plan" feedback loop that is yielding good results. Steps:

1. Spec

2. Plan

3. Read the plan & tell it to fix its bad ideas.

4. (NB) Critique the plan (loop) & write a detailed report

5. Update the plan

6. Review and check the plan

7. Implement plan

Detailed here:

https://x.com/PetrusTheron/status/2016887552163119225

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

#255

Post by Bishonen88 »

puchatek wrote: post #244
Bishonen88 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Todos, habits, goals, calendar, meals, notes, bookmarks, shopping lists, finances. More or less that with Google cal integration, garmin Integration (Auto updates workout habits, weight goals) family sharing/gamification, daily/weekly reviews, ai summaries and more. All built by just prompting Claude for feature after feature, with me writing 0 lines.

Is it on GH?

It was when I mvp'd it 3 weeks ago. Then I removed it as I was toying with the idea of somehow monetizing it. Then I added a few features which would make monetization impossible (e.g. How the app obtains etf/stock prices live and some other things). I reckon I could remove those and put in gh during the week if I don't forget. The quality of the Web app is SaaS grade IMO. Keyboard shortcuts, cmd+k, natural language parsing, great ui that doesn't look like made by ai in 5min. Might post here the link.

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

#256

Post by therealdrag0 »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #31
shepherdjerred wrote: post #19

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?

Audit logging is different than developer logging… companies will have entire teams dedicated to audit systems.

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

#257

Post by lastdong »

Google Anti-Gravity has this process built in. This is essentially a cycle a developer would follow: plan/analyse - document/discuss - break down tasks/implement. We’ve been using requirements and design documents as best practice since leaving our teenage bedroom lab for the professional world. I suppose this could be seen as our coding agents coming of age.

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

#258

Post by Bishonen88 »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #243
Bishonen88 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno. My 80k+ LOC personal life planner, with a native android app, eink display view still one shots most features/bugs I encounter. I just open a new instance let it know what I want and 5min later it's done.

In 5 min you are one shotting smaller changes to the larger code base right? Not the entire 80k likes which was the other comments point afaict.

Yeah, then I guess I misunderstood the post. Its smaller features one by one ofc.

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

#259

Post by brumar »

pgt wrote: post #254

My process is similar, but I recently added a new "critique the plan" feedback loop that is yielding good results. Steps: 1. Spec 2. Plan 3. Read the plan & tell it to fix its bad ideas. 4. (NB) Critique the plan (loop) & write a detailed report 5. Update the plan 6. Review and check the plan 7. Implement plan Detailed here: https://x.com/PetrusTheron/status/2016887552163119225

Same. In my experience, the first plan always benefits from being challenged once or twice by claude itself.

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

#260

Post by AstroBen »

mvkel wrote: post #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…

100,000 lines is approx. one million words. The average person reads at 250wpm. The entire thing would take 66 hours just to read, assuming you were approaching it like a fiction book, not thinking anything over
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