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Comment by LeoPanthera

1 day ago

Early versions of plan mode would erase the chat history and present the plan as the start of a new session when you approved it.

I miss that. It worked really well, and it kept the context clean.

In my experience, around the time the author describes as starting to not need plan mode is when erasing the chat history became an anti-feature. I found the agents were doing better when they had the context already, and with the history I no longer needed to micro-manage persisting various caveats and rejections to the plan artifact. The amount of prompt construction necessary went down overall.

  • By the time my plan’s done I’m usually between 200 and 350k context. Even if keeping that around gives a performance bump for the implementation (which I haven’t noticed to be the case) it balloons the cost. I would much rather put everything in a plan file and start fresh.

    Plus, I usually plan with a more expensive model and guide implementation with a cheaper model (with smaller validation calls back to a more expensive model)

that still essentially works. ask it to write a plan doc to a file. then when you're ready to implement, start a new session with a prompt to review the plan doc and then start building.