Plan Mode Is Dead: Why AI Planning Tools Failed and What Comes Next
After building Nuanced, a desktop coding app centered on planning, Ayman Nadeem concluded that plan modes are obsolete. Models now infer context and make reasonable assumptions, eliminating the need for detailed specs. AI-generated plans are painful to read, and separating planning from building creates a rigid waterfall. The real challenge remains: helping humans maintain a coherent mental model as AI agents change code faster than we can inspect.
I think the biggest mistake I made was turning the plan into an artifact instead of designing a process for improved human understanding.
- bcherny
[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.
- socketcluster
With Claude, most tasks do not require discussion, I know exactly what to ask and what approach I want to take but for especially complex functionality with multiple possible options, I will ask it to list the tradeoffs and suggest an approach. It's still kind of 50/50 whether I take its suggestion or not; it's still a bit off in terms of weighing up importance, but it's really good at listing out relevant constraints and tradeoffs. It sometimes misses opportunities but it always sees the tradeoffs and the issues.
- taurath
I'm actively watching understanding slip away from developers, code review getting paired down to no comment checkmarks, and codebases go to bloated messes that nobody can read. Axioms like engineers must understand and take responsibility for the code they ship are getting torn down, and the products coming out are reflecting conway's law, becoming impenetrably obtuse and always "so complex there are no obvious deficiencies" (as opposed to "so simple there are no obvious deficiencies" which used to be the aim).
The one thing plan mode helped is for the humans to get an understanding of the strategy, and be able to poke around and look at the design and architecture. You can achieve this with some self discipline and keeping shorter leashes on agents, but it feels like a losing battle. The best devs still put out good code, but the poor devs are learning nothing while their metrics look great. I can't help but think we are racking up immense amounts of debt that will very soon become due.
- bityard
When I draft my idea for the implementation of a feature or bug fix, I don't even trust a _human_ to understand what I mean the first time. There are _always_ either errors on my part, or erroneous assumptions on theirs. Everything from "this accounts for X and Y, but not Z which breaks the whole thing" to "this part of the idea directly contradicts what with you said earlier, what do you want to do about it?"
I can't bring myself to trust that an LLM understands what I mean better than any human would, no matter how "good" people claim they are getting.
TFA seems to be advocating for regular old vibecoding. Code now and ask questions later. Which is their choice, and is perhaps even a valid choice in many cases. But at least call it what it is.
- tcdent
The real reason why plan mode is dead is because you can just conversationally instruct the agent to not make changes to the repository or to make changes to selected documents only, and it will listen. There was a time when we needed to enforce this via selected tool use, but we have surpassed that.