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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

#311

Post by shevy-java »

BoredPositron wrote: post #279
chaboud wrote: post #241

The author seems to think they've hit upon something revolutionary... They've actually hit upon something that several of us have evolved to naturally. LLM's are like unreliable interns with boundless energy. They make silly mistakes, wander into annoying structural traps, and have to be unwound if left to their own devices. It's like the genie that almost pathologically misinterprets your wishes. So, how do you solv…

It's alchemy all over again.

Alchemy involved a lot of do-it-yourself though. With AI it is like someone else does all the work (well, almost all the work).

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

#313

Post by gehsty »

energy123 wrote: post #230
scuff3d wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How anybody can read stuff like this and still take all this seriously is beyond me. This is becoming the engineering equivalent of astrology.

Anthropic recommends doing magic invocations: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/19/claude-code-best-pract... It's easy to know why they work. The magic invocation increases test-time compute (easy to verify yourself - try!). And an increase in test-time compute is demonstrated to increase answer correctness (see any benchmark). It might surprise you to know that the only different between GPT 5.2-low and GPT 5.2-xhi…

I think this was more of a thing on older models. Since I started using Opus 4.5 I have not felt the need to do this.

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

#314

Post by gehsty »

Betelbuddy wrote: post #72
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…

Its very logical and pretty obvious when you do code generation. If you ask the same model, to generate code by starting with: - You are a Python Developer... or - You are a Professional Python Developer... or - You are one of the World most renowned Python Experts, with several books written on the subject, and 15 years of experience in creating highly reliable production quality code... You will notice a clear impr…

Do you think that Anthropic don’t include things like this in their harness / system prompts? I feel like this kind of prompts are uneccessary with Opus 4.5 onwards, obviously based on my own experience (I used to do this, on switching to opus I stopped and have implemented more complex problems, more successfully).

I am having the most success describing what I want as humanly as possible, describing outcomes clearly, making sure the plan is good and clearing context before implementing.

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

#316

Post by zozbot234 »

marc_g wrote: post #265
chaboud wrote: post #241

The author seems to think they've hit upon something revolutionary... They've actually hit upon something that several of us have evolved to naturally. LLM's are like unreliable interns with boundless energy. They make silly mistakes, wander into annoying structural traps, and have to be unwound if left to their own devices. It's like the genie that almost pathologically misinterprets your wishes. So, how do you solv…

I’ve also found that a bigger focus on expanding my agents.md as the project rolls on has led to less headaches overall and more consistency (non-surprisingly). It’s the same as asking juniors to reflect on the work they’ve completed and to document important things that can help them in the future. Software Manger is a good way to put this.

AGENTS.md should mostly point to real documentation and design files that humans will also read and keep up to date. It's rare that something about a project is only of interest to AI agents.

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

#317

Post by BoredPositron »

shevy-java wrote: post #311
BoredPositron wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's alchemy all over again.

Alchemy involved a lot of do-it-yourself though. With AI it is like someone else does all the work (well, almost all the work).

It was mainly a jab at the protoscientific nature of it.

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

#318

Post by hathawsh »

jamesmcq wrote: post #36
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…

Trust me I'm very impressed at the progress AI has made, and maybe we'll get to the point where everything is 100% correct all the time and better than any human could write. I'm skeptical we can get there with the LLM approach though. The problem is LLMs are great at simple implementation, even large amounts of simple implementation, but I've never seen it develop something more than trivial correctly. The larger pr…

Several months ago, just for fun, I asked Claude (the web site, not Claude Code) to build a web page with a little animated cannon that shoots at the mouse cursor with a ballistic trajectory. It built the page in seconds, but the aim was incorrect; it always shot too low. I told it the aim was off. It still got it wrong. I prompted it several times to try to correct it, but it never got it right. In fact, the web page started to break and Claude was introducing nasty bugs.

More recently, I tried the same experiment, again with Claude. I used the exact same prompt. This time, the aim was exactly correct. Instead of spending my time trying to correct it, I was able to ask it to add features. I've spent more time writing this comment on HN than I spent optimizing this toy. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d7f1c13c-2423-4f03-9fc4-8...

My point is that AI-assisted coding has improved dramatically in the past few months. I don't know whether it can reason deeply about things, but it can certainly imitate a human who reasons deeply. I've never seen any technology improve at this rate.

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

#319

Post by mcv »

This is great. My workflow is also heading in that direction, so this is a great roadmap. I've already learned that just naively telling Claude what to do and letting it work, is a recipe for disaster and wasted time.

I'm not this structured yet, but I often start with having it analyse and explain a piece of code, so I can correct it before we move on. I also often switch to an LLM that's separate from my IDE because it tends to get confused by sprawling context.

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

#320

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

> if you don't plan perfectly, you'll have to start over from scratch if anything goes wrong.

You just revert what the AI agent changed and revise/iterate on the previous step - no need to start over. This can of course involve restricting the work to a smaller change so that the agent isn't overwhelmed by complexity.

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