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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

#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't capture why asking the model to read the content "more deeply" will have any impact on whatever output the LLM generates.

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

#13

[flagged]

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-...

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

#15
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.

Most of these AI coding articles seem to be about greenfield development.

That said, if you're on a serious team writing professional software there is still tons of value in always telling AI to plan first, unless it's a small quick task. This post just takes it a few steps further and formalizes it.

I find Cursor works much more reliably using plan mode, reviewing/revising output in markdown, then pressing build. Which isn't a ton of overhead but often leads to lots of context switching as it definitely adds more time.

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

#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 subagents that for each task:

  a. Implements the task

  b. Spec reviews the completed task

  c. Code reviews the completed task
7. When all tasks complete: create a PR for me to review

8. Go back to the agent with any comments

9. If finished, delete the plan files and merge the PR

[0]: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

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

#17
post #11

One thing for me has been the ability to iterate over plans - with a better visual of them as well as ability to annotate feedback about the plan. https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator Plannotator does this really effectively and natively through hooks

Wow, I've been needing this! The one issue I’ve had with terminals is reviewing plans, and desiring the ability to provide feedback on specific plan sections in a more organized way.

Really nice ui based on the demo.

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

#18
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…

Yeah, it's definitely a strange new world we're in, where I have to "trick" the computer into cooperating. The other day I told Claude "Yes you can", and it went off and did something it just said it couldn't do!

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

#19
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 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 a day, maybe two. I had 4-5 other tasks going on in other tabs while I waited the 20-30 min for Claude to generate the feature.

After Claude generated, I needed to manually test that it worked, and it did. I then needed to review the code before making a PR. In all, maybe 30-45 minutes of my actual time to add a small feature.

All I can really say is... are you sure you're using it right? Have you _really_ invested time into learning how to use AI tools?

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

#20
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…

If you’ve ever desired the ability for annotating the plan more visually, try fitting Plannotator in this workflow. There is a slash command for use when you use custom workflows outside of normal plan mode.

https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator

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