How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by fintechie » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #269

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…

Revolutionary or not it was very nice of the author to make time and effort to share their workflow. For those starting out using Claude Code it gives a structured way to get things done bypassing the time/energy needed to “hit upon something that several of us have evolved to naturally”.

This kind of flows have been documented in the wild for some time now. They started to pop up in the Cursor forums 2+ years ago... eg: https://github.com/johnpeterman72/CursorRIPER

Personally I have been using a similar flow for almost 3 years now, tailored for my needs. Everybody who uses AI for coding eventually gravitates towards a similar pattern because it works quite well (for all IDEs, CLIs, TUIs)

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

#442

Post by remify » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

sparin9 wrote: post #418

I think the real value here isn’t “planning vs not planning,” it’s forcing the model to surface its assumptions before they harden into code. LLMs don’t usually fail at syntax. They fail at invisible assumptions about architecture, constraints, invariants, etc. A written plan becomes a debugging surface for those assumptions.

Sub agent also helps a lot in that regard. Have an agent do the planning, have an implementation agent do the code and have another one do the review. Clear responsabilities helps a lot.

There also blue team / red team that works.

The idea is always the same: help LLM to reason properly with less and more clear instructions.

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

#443

Post by kaycey2022 » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

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 been doing the exact same thing for 2 months now. I wish I had gotten off my ass and written a blog post about it. I can't blame the author for gathering all the well deserved clout they are getting for it now.

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

#444

Post by hghbbjh » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

Bishonen88 wrote: post #347

dakolli wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

> but in doing what I don't know as well.

Comments like these really help ground what I read online about LLMs. This matches how low performing devs at my work use AI, and their PRs are a net negative on the team. They take on tasks they aren’t equipped to handle and use LLMs to fill the gaps quickly instead of taking time to learn (which LLMs speed up!).

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

#445

Post by indiekitai » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

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

#446

Post by mlaretallack » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #346

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…

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 mo…

I use AWS Kiro, and its spec driven developement is exactly this, I find it really works well as it makes me slow down and think about what I want it to do.

Requirements, design, task list, coding.

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

#447

Post by rescbr » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

hbarka wrote: post #253

nostrademons wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it does more harm than good on recent models. The LLM has to override its system prompt to role-play, wasting context and computing cycles instead of working on the task.

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

#448

Post by skydhash » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #431

Bishonen88 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

> 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. This has been my experience. We use Miro at work for diagramming. Lots of visual people on the team, myself included. Using Miro's MCP I draft a solution to a problem and have Miro diagram it. Once we talk it through as a team, I have Cla…

I'm still waiting for the multi-years success stories. Greenfield solutions are always easy (which is why we have frameworks that automate them). But maintaining solutions over years is always the true test of any technologies.

It's already telling that nothing has staying power in the LLMs world (other than the chat box). Once the limitations can no longer be hidden by the hype and the true cost is revealed, there's always a next thing to pivot to.

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

#449

Post by hghbbjh » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

shepherdjerred wrote: post #19

jamesmcq wrote: 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…

> In all, maybe 30-45 minutes of my actual time to add a small feature

Why would this take you multiple days to do if it only took you 30m to review the code? Depends on the problem, but if I’m able to review something the time it’d take me to write it is usually at most 2x more worst case scenario - often it’s about equal.

I say this because after having used these tools, most of the speed ups you’re describing come at the cost of me not actually understanding or thoroughly reviewing the code. And this is corroborated by any high output LLM users - you have to trust the agent if you want to go fast.

Which is fine in some cases! But for those of us who have jobs where we are personally responsible for the code, we can’t take these shortcuts.

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

#450

Post by colinhb » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

miohtama wrote: post #382

colinhb wrote: post #371

Quoting the article: > One trick I use constantly: for well-contained features where I’ve seen a good implementation in an open source repo, I’ll share that code as a reference alongside the plan request. If I want to add sortable IDs, I paste the ID generation code from a project that does it well and say “this is how they do sortable IDs, write a plan.md explaining how we can adopt a similar approach.” Claude works…

Concepts are not copyrightable.

The article isn’t describing someone who learned the concept of sortable IDs and then wrote their own implementation.

It describes copying and pasting actual code from one project into a prompt so a language model can reproduce it in another project.

It’s a mechanical transformation of someone else’s copyrighted expression (their code) laundered through a statistical model instead of a human copyist.