Comment by radley
8 hours ago
Plan mode is critical in the beginning, because there's a lot of long tail decisions that haven't been considered, let alone resolved.
But as skills and memory are populated over time, Plan mode isn't as necessary. It becomes simpler to let Claude just build and get something general in place that works, and then refine from there. Auto mode will ask essential questions.
I still use Plan mode for big feature changes, to confirm that I've asked for what I want in the right way. I tend to prompt casually, with only a few specific details. Plan mode helps me see the whole picture before committing. In a few cases, it also helped me decide the feature I asked for was wrong.
I don't use Plan mode because I plan out work with a ticket based approach (that also works as a memory store), but I wish there were some kind of Plan mode like harness feature to try as hard as possible to stop it from beginning to code. With the newer models, I have started to have a lot of trouble with them proceeding through the QA with me where I scope out the work and refine requirements and then immediately begin to do the work rather than either making tickets or giving me the full plan to thumbs up like I tell them to do.
So it sounds like we use it somewhat similarly, just taking a glance at it before the work starts, and that's becoming harder to do in my experience. It is important because problems with the overall plan or strategy end up magnified the further you proceed with development.