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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

#231

It’s worrying to me that nobody really knows how LLMs work. We create prompts with or without certain words and hope it works. That’s my perspective anyway

It's the same as dealing with a human. You convey a spec for a problem and the language you use matters. You can convey the problem in (from your perspective) a clear way and you will get mixed results nonetheless. You will have to continue to refine the solution with them.

Genuinely: no one really knows how humans work either.

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

#232

It’s worrying to me that nobody really knows how LLMs work. We create prompts with or without certain words and hope it works. That’s my perspective anyway

It's actually no different from how real software is made. Requirements come from the business side, and through an odd game of telephone get down to developers.

The team that has developers closest to the customer usually makes the better product...or has the better product/market fit.

Then it's iteration.

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

#233
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…

> That’s because it’s superstition.

This field is full of it. Practices are promoted by those who tie their personal or commercial brand to it for increased exposure, and adopted by those who are easily influenced and don't bother verifying if they actually work.

This is why we see a new Markdown format every week, "skills", "benchmarks", and other useless ideas, practices, and measurements. Consider just how many "how I use AI" articles are created and promoted. Most of the field runs on anecdata.

It's not until someone actually takes the time to evaluate some of these memes, that they find little to no practical value in them.[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034087

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

#236
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.

What is a personal life planner?

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

#238
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…

—HAL, open the shuttle bay doors.

(chirp)

—HAL, please open the shuttle bay doors.

(pause)

—HAL!

—I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

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

#239
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

This is my experience too, but it's pushed me to make much smaller plans and to commit things to a feature branch far more atomically so I can revert a step to the previous commit, or bin the entire feature by going back to main. I do this far more now than I ever did when I was writing the code by hand.

This is how developers should work regardless of how the code is being developed. I think this is a small but very real way AI has actually made me a better developer (unless I stop doing it when I don't use AI... not tried that yet.)

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

#240
post #236

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.

What is a personal life planner?

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.
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