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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

#551

Post by __mharrison__ »

turingsroot wrote: post #154

I've been teaching AI coding tool workshops for the past year and this planning-first approach is by far the most reliable pattern I've seen across skill levels. The key insight that most people miss: this isn't a new workflow invented for AI - it's how good senior engineers already work. You read the code deeply, write a design doc, get buy-in, then implement. The AI just makes the implementation phase dramatically…

I teach a lot of folks who "aren't software engineers" but are sitting in front of Jupyter all day writing code.

Covertly teaching software engineering best practices is super relevant. I've also found testing skills sorely lacking and even more important in AI driven development.

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

#553

Post by edmundsauto »

antonvs wrote: post #549
remify wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since the phases are sequential, what’s the benefit of a sub agent vs just sequential prompts to the same agent? Just orchestration?

Context pollution, I think. Just because something is sequential in a context file doesn’t mean it’ll happen sequentially, but if you use subagents there is a separation of concerns. I also feel like one bloated context window feels a little sloppy in the execution (and costs more in tokens).

YMMV, I’m still figuring this stuff out

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

#554

Post by nubg »

dakolli wrote: post #407
nubg wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What genuinely new thing have you produced?

Well I'm actually producing, not having an llm do things for me and frying my brain in the process. If you're building things with the process described above you're not producing anything, Dalio or Altman's GPUs are, you're simply just a slot machine user. Have fun paying for "Think for me Saas". 2025-2026: The year everyone became the mental equivalent of obese and let their brain atrophy. There are no shortcuts in…

I must say i 100% agree with brain atrophy when it comes to writing code etc. But I think I am gaining extreme brain training when it comes to architecting, predicting outcomes, and iterating. We will see in the long run which of these skills the market values more.

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

#555

Post by drivebyhooting »

remify wrote: post #442
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.

This runs counter to the advice in the fine article: one long continuous session building context.

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

#556

Post by jerryharri »

ryandrake wrote: post #514
intrasight wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're learning how to be an engineer all over again. The authors process is super-close what we were taught in engineering 101 40 years ago.

I'm currently having Claude help me reverse engineer the wire protocol of a moderately expensive hardware device, where I have very little data about how it works. You better believe "we" do it by the book. Large, detailed plan md file laying out exactly what it will do, what it will try, what it will not try, guardrails, and so on. And a "knowledge base" md file that documents everything discovered about how the dev…

Be careful of attention collapse. Details in a large governance file can get "forgotten" by the llm. It'll be extremely apologetic when you discover it's failed to follow some guardrails you specified, but it can still happen.

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

#557

Post by oblio »

imiric wrote: post #233
FuckButtons wrote: post #150

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…

> 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 "h…

> 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.

Oh, the blasphemy!

So, like VB, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, Mongo, etc? :-)

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

#558

Post by yawnr »

scuff3d wrote: post #106
haolez wrote: 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…

How anybody can read stuff like this and still take all this seriously is beyond me. This is becoming the engineering equivalent of astrology.

Nice to hear someone say it. Like what are we even doing? It's exhausting.
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