[I work on Claude Code] I broadly agree with the author’s point: plan mode was useful, and is no longer useful.
In Claude Code, all plan mode does is add a little reminder to every user message along the lines of “you’re in plan mode, please don’t code yet”. It’s something I came up with late on a Sunday night many months ago, when I got tired of asking Claude to plan with me first before coding in each new session. Something people might not realize is plan mode has always been a prompt — it has never changed the toolset because doing so would break the prompt cache, and so would be expensive for users.
This worked well for a while, until a few months ago, using early versions of Fable, I realized that I wasn’t using plan mode anymore because the model just got it, and because for the increasingly complex work I asked the model to do, planning had become interactive and iterative. With Opus 5.5, I feel Opus has gotten to that point too.
For codebase understanding, I sometimes ask Claude to generate an artifact that explains some aspect of its changes. For complex diffs to core parts of the system, I will often ask it to make diagrams or even interactive demos so I can better understand the change and alternatives considered. I don’t do this very often, but it’s a useful way to explain code when you need it. I ask Claude to attach these artifacts to its PRs also, so others can understand and future Claudes have the context.
Fascinating! I literally never use Claude without plan mode and I find it's basically useless without it, constantly wasting tokens going in circles on irrelevant things. Fable or Opus. I feel like neither has a good sense for how to architect things and if I don't use plan mode it usually wastes hours of time chasing it's tail or implementing kludges on kludges to get something working that would be a much simple fix elsewhere, especially when working on a larger codebase.
Hence why the Anthropic employee is telling you to not use it and just aimlessly throw tokens at a wall. It'll eventually get you there, sure, and consume more tokens. This sounds absurd, but trust that Anthropic (and any large company) is hyper aware of how customer behavior impacts their revenue, and they certainly will try to steer you into behavior that increases revenue.
Also this is a way less removed process that I want nothing to do with. The more removed I am from the process the more I hate my job, get burned out and genuinely wish that Anthropic never existed.
Even if it could "just know" or infer my intent. It wouldnt be desirable.
Edit: Oh yeah its Boris, hes one or the most disengenous shovel sellers on earth right now.
I mean if you want it to plan something without writing code first you literally just need to ask it to plan out the implementation first it's not exactly a difficult concept
So you think telling a model once to "do not write code, just plan" vs having an enum that causes that same text to be added to each message will somehow waste tokens and will surely make anthropic much better off..
The Anthropic employee literally told you plan mode is a "we're still planning!!!" at the end of the prompt. Plan mode is useless because you can literally type "dont write code yet" and get the same effect, not because you should never plan in general.
Sure and I should also have been more specific, I don't always use "plan mode" I often just do planning without explicitly activating it just via prompting, point being that the robot doesn't work for me without some time spent planning out what to do.
bcherny · · focus · HN ↗
In Claude Code, all plan mode does is add a little reminder to every user message along the lines of “you’re in plan mode, please don’t code yet”. It’s something I came up with late on a Sunday night many months ago, when I got tired of asking Claude to plan with me first before coding in each new session. Something people might not realize is plan mode has always been a prompt — it has never changed the toolset because doing so would break the prompt cache, and so would be expensive for users.
This worked well for a while, until a few months ago, using early versions of Fable, I realized that I wasn’t using plan mode anymore because the model just got it, and because for the increasingly complex work I asked the model to do, planning had become interactive and iterative. With Opus 5.5, I feel Opus has gotten to that point too.
For codebase understanding, I sometimes ask Claude to generate an artifact that explains some aspect of its changes. For complex diffs to core parts of the system, I will often ask it to make diagrams or even interactive demos so I can better understand the change and alternatives considered. I don’t do this very often, but it’s a useful way to explain code when you need it. I ask Claude to attach these artifacts to its PRs also, so others can understand and future Claudes have the context.
thot_experiment · · focus · HN ↗
physicallyIllfr · · focus · HN ↗
Also this is a way less removed process that I want nothing to do with. The more removed I am from the process the more I hate my job, get burned out and genuinely wish that Anthropic never existed.
Even if it could "just know" or infer my intent. It wouldnt be desirable.
Edit: Oh yeah its Boris, hes one or the most disengenous shovel sellers on earth right now.
weird-eye-issue · · focus · HN ↗
gf000 · · focus · HN ↗
nananana9 · · focus · HN ↗
The Anthropic employee literally told you plan mode is a "we're still planning!!!" at the end of the prompt. Plan mode is useless because you can literally type "dont write code yet" and get the same effect, not because you should never plan in general.
thot_experiment · · focus · HN ↗