Comment by ramoz
8 hours ago
> consensus best practice
I'm not sure I agree with this. I don't think there needs to be a whole spec & documentation process before plan mode.
There is alternative thought leadership that the waterfall approach for building out projects is not the right Agentic pattern[1].
Planning itself can be such an intensive process where you're designing and figuring out the specs on the fly in a focused manner for the thing the agent will actually develop next. Not sure how useful it is to go beyond this in terms of specs that live outside of the Agentic loop for what should be developed now and next.
I've evolved my own process, originally from plain Claude Code to Claude Code with heavy spec integrated capabilities. However, that became a burden for me: a lot of contextual drift in those documents and then self managing & orchestrating of Claude Code over those documents. I've since reoriented myself to base Claude Code with a fairly high-level effort specific to ad-hoc planning sessions. Sometimes the plans will revolve around specific GitHub issues or feature requests in the ticketing system, but that's about it.
[1] https://boristane.com/blog/the-software-development-lifecycl...
I think there's a Danger Zone when planning is light-weight and iterative, and code is cheap, but reviewing code is expensive: it leads to a kind of local hill-climbing.
Suppose you iterate through many sessions of lightweight planning, implementation, and code review. It _feels_ high velocity, you're cranking through the feature, but you've also invested a lot of your time and energy (planning isn't free, and code review and fit-for-purpose checks, in particular, are expensive). As often happens -- with or without AI -- you get towards the end and realize: there might have been a fundamentally better approach to take.
The tradeoff of that apparent velocity is that _now_ course correction is much more challenging. Those ephemeral plans are now gone. The effort you put into providing context within those plans is gone. You have an locally optimal solution, but you don't have a great way of expressing how to start over from scratch pointed in a slightly different direction.
I think that part can be really valuable, because given a sufficiently specific arrow, the AI can just rip.
Whether it's worth the effort, I suppose, depends on how high-conviction you are on your original chosen approach.
nice thoughts