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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

#501
I’ve begun using Gpt’y to iron out most of the planning phase to essentially bootstrap the conversation with Claude. I’m curious if others have done that.

Sometimes I find it quite difficult to form the right question. Using Gpt’y I can explore my question and often times end up asking a completely different question.

It also helps derisk hitting my usage limits with pro. I feel like I’m having richer conversations now w/ Claude but I also feel more confident in my prompts.

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

#502

I don’t use plan.md docs either, but I recognise the underlying idea: you need a way to keep agent output constrained by reality. My workflow is more like scaffold -> thin vertical slices -> machine-checkable semantics -> repeat. Concrete example: I built and shipped a live ticketing system for my club (Kolibri Tickets). It’s not a toy: real payments (Stripe), email delivery, ticket verification at the door, frontend…

Now that code is cheap, I ensured my side project has unit/integration tests (will enforce 100% coverage), Playwright tests, static typing (its in Python), scripts for all tasks. Will learn mutation testing too (yes, its overkill). Now my agent works upto 1 hour in loops and emits concise code I dont have to edit much.

Totally get it, and I think we’re describing the same control loop from different angles.

Where I differ slightly is: “100% coverage” can turn into productivity theatre. It’s a metric that’s easy to optimize while missing the thing you actually care about: do we have machine-checkable invariants at the points where drift is expensive?

The harness that’s paid off for me (on a live payments system) is:

  - thin vertical slice first (end-to-end runnable, even if ugly)

  - tests at the seams (payments, emails, ticket verification / idempotency)

  - state-machine semantics where concurrency/ordering matters

  - unit tests as supporting beams, not wallpaper
Then refactors become routine, because the tests will make breakage explicit.

So yes: “code is cheap” -> increase verification. Just careful not to replace engineering judgement with an easily gamed proxy.

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

#503
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…

Why do you think that? Given how the attention and optimization works on training and inference it makes sense that these kind of words trigger deeper analysis (more steps, introducing more thinking/reasoning steps which wield indeed yield less problems. Even if you make model to spend more time on token outputting you will have more opportunity to emerge better reasoning in between.

At least this is how I understand it how LLMs work.

Possibly can be confirmed something with tools this : https://www.neuronpedia.org/

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

#504
I appreciate the author taking the time to share his workflow even though I really dislike the way this article is written. My dislike stems from sentences like this one: "I’ve been using Claude Code as my primary development tool for approx 9 months, and the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools." There is nothing radically different in the way he's using it (quite the opposite) and the are so many people that wrote about their workflows (and which are almost exactly the same, here's just one example [1]). Apart from that, the obvious use of AI to write or edit the article makes it further indigestible: "That’s it. No magic prompts, no elaborate system instructions, no clever hacks. Just a disciplined pipeline that separates thinking from typing."

[1] https://github.com/snarktank/ai-dev-tasks

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

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If it did work, well, the oldest trick in computer science is writing compilers, i suppose we will just have to write an English to pedantry compiler. "Add tests to this function" for GPT-3.5-era models was much less effective than "you are a senior engineer. add tests for this function. as a good engineer, you should follow the patterns used in these other three function+test examples, using this framework and moc…

Today’s llms have had a tonne of deep rl using git histories from more software projects than you’ve ever even heard of, given the latency of a response I doubt there’s any intermediate preprocessing, it’s just what the model has been trained to do.

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

#506
post #460

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…

> LLM's are like unreliable interns with boundless energy This isn’t directed specifically at you but the general community of SWEs: we need to stop anthropomorphizing a tool. Code agents are not human capable and scaling pattern matching will never hit that goal. That’s all hype and this is coming from someone who runs the range of daily CC usage. I’m using CC to its fullest capability while also being a good shephe…

It’s pretty clear they effectively take on the roles of various software related personas. Designer, coder, architect, auditor, etc…

Pretending otherwise is counter-productive. This ship has already sailed, it is fairly clear the best way to make use of them is to pass input messages to them as if they are an agent of a person in the role.

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

#508
Here's my workflow, hopefully concise enough as a reply, in case helpful to those very few who'll actually see it:

Research -> Define 'Domains' -> BDD -> Domain Specs -> Overall Arch Specs / complete/consistent/gap analysis -> Spec Revision -> TDD Dev.

Smaller projects this is overkill. Larger projects, imho, gain considerable value from BDD and Overall Architecture Spec complete/consistent/gap analysis...

Cheers

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

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice that MOE isn’t different experts for different types of problems. It’s per token and not really connect to problem type. So if you send a python code then the first one in function can be one expert, second another expert and so on.

Can you back this up with documentation? I don't believe that this is the case.

The router that routes the tokens between the "experts" is part of the training itself as well. The name MoE is really not a good acronym as it makes people believe it's on a more coarse level and that each of the experts somehow is trained by different corpus etc. But what do I know, there are new archs every week and someone might have done a MoE differently.

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

#510

I’ve begun using Gpt’y to iron out most of the planning phase to essentially bootstrap the conversation with Claude. I’m curious if others have done that. Sometimes I find it quite difficult to form the right question. Using Gpt’y I can explore my question and often times end up asking a completely different question. It also helps derisk hitting my usage limits with pro. I feel like I’m having richer conversations n…

What's "gpt'y"?
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