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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

#341
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wtf, why would you write 100k lines of plan to produce 30k loc.. JUST WRITE THE CODE!!!

That's not (or should not be what's happening). They write a short high level plan (let's say 200 words). The plan asks the agent to write a more detailed implementation plan (written by the LLM, let's say 2000-5000 words). They read this plan and adjust as needed, even sending it to the agent for re-dos. Once the implementation plan is done, they ask the agent to write the actual code changes. Then they review that…

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s actually really common. If you look at Claude Code’s own system prompts written by Anthropic, they’re littered with “CRITICAL (RULE 0):” type of statements, and other similar prompting styles.

Where can I find those?

This analysis is a good starting point: https://southbridge-research.notion.site/Prompt-Engineering-...

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

#344
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its ai written though, the tells are in pretty much every paragraph.

I don’t think it’s that big a red flag anymore. Most people use ai to rewrite or clean up content, so I’d think we should actually evaluate content for what it is rather than stop at “nah it’s ai written.”

>Most people use ai to rewrite or clean up content

I think your sentence should have been "people who use ai do so to mostly rewrite or clean up content", but even then I'd question the statistical truth behind that claim.

Personally, seeing something written by AI means that the person who wrote it did so just for looks and not for substance. Claiming to be a great author requires both penmanship and communication skills, and delegating one or either of them to a large language model inherently makes you less than that.

However, when the point is just the contents of the paragraph(s) and nothing more then I don't care who or what wrote it. An example is the result of a research, because I'd certainly won't care about the prose or effort given to write the thesis but more on the results (is this about curing cancer now and forever? If yes, no one cares if it's written with AI).

With that being said, there's still that I get anywhere close to understanding the author behind the thoughts and opinions. I believe the way someone writes hints to the way they think and act. In that sense, using LLM's to rewrite something to make it sound more professional than what you would actually talk in appropriate contexts makes it hard for me to judge someone's character, professionalism, and mannerisms. Almost feels like they're trying to mask part of themselves. Perhaps they lack confidence in their ability to sound professional and convincing?

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

#345
This is similar to what I do. I instruct an Architect mode with a set of rules related to phased implementation and detailed code artifacts output to a report.md file. After a couple of rounds of review and usually some responses that either tie together behaviors across context, critique poor choices or correct assumptions, there is a piece of work defined for a coder LLM to perform. With the new Opus 4.6 I then select specialist agents to review the report.md, prompted with detailed insight into particular areas of the software. The feedback from these specialist agent reviews is often very good and sometimes catches things I had missed. Once all of this is done, I let the agent make the changes and move onto doing something else. I typically rename and commit the report.md files which can be useful as an alternative to git diff / commit messages etc.

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

#346

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…

Agreed. The process described is much more elaborate than what I do but quite similar. I start to discuss in great details what I want to do, sometimes asking the same question to different LLMs. Then a todo list, then manual review of the code, esp. each function signature, checking if the instructions have been followed and if there are no obvious refactoring opportunities (there almost always are).

The LLM does most of the coding, yet I wouldn't call it "vibe coding" at all.

"Tele coding" would be more appropriate.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't write 100k plan lines. The llm did (99.9% of it at least or more). Writing 30k by hand would take weeks if not months. Llms do it in an afternoon.

And my weeks or months of work beats an LLMs 10/10 times. There are no shortcuts in life.

I have no doubts that it does for many people. But the time/cost tradeoff is still unquestionable. I know I could create what LLMs do for me in the frontend/backend in most cases as good or better - I know that, because I've done it at work for years. But to create a somewhat complex app with lots of pages/features/apis etc. would take me months if not a year++ since I'd be working on it only on the weekends for a few hours. Claude code helps me out by getting me to my goal in a fraction of the time. Its superpower lies not only in doign what I know but faster, but in doing what I don't know as well.

I yield similar benefits at work. I can wow management with LLM assited/vibe coded apps. What previously would've taken a multi-man team weeks of planning and executing, stand ups, jour fixes, architecture diagrams, etc. can now be done within a single week by myself. For the type of work I do, managers do not care whether I could do it better if I'd code it myself. They are amazed however that what has taken months previously, can be done in hours nowadays. And I for sure will try to reap benefits of LLMs for as long as they don't replace me rather than being idealistic and fighting against them.

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

#348
Sorry but I didn't get the hype with this post, isnt it what most of the people doing? I want to see more posts on how you use the claude "smart" without feeding the whole codebase polluting the context window and also more best practices on cost efficient ways to use it, this workflow is clearly burning million tokens per session, for me is a No

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

#349
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…

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.

If you wouldn't mind sharing more about this in the future I'd love to read about it.

I've been thinking about doing something like that myself because I'm one of those people who have tried countless apps but there's always a couple deal breakers that cause me to drop the app.

I figured trying to agentically develop a planner app with the exact feature set I need would be an interesting and fun experiment.

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