I do have an issue with the plan mode. And nine out of ten times, it is objectively terrible. The only benefit I've seen in the past from using plan mode is it remembers more information between compactions as compared to the vanilla - non-agent team workflow.
Interestingly, though, if you ask it to maintain a running document of what you're discussing in a markdown file and make it create an evergreen task at the top of its todo list which references the markdown file and instructs itself to read it on every compaction, you get much better results.
Huh, very much not my experience with plan mode. I use plan mode before almost anything more than truly trivial task because I've found it to be far more efficient. I want a chance to see and discuss what claude is planning to do before it races off and does the thing, because there are often different approaches and I only sometimes agree with the approach claude would decide on by itself.
Planning is great. It's plan mode that is unpredictable in how it discusses it and what it remembers from the discussion.
I still have discussions with the agents and agent team members. I just force it to save it in a document in the repo itself and refer back to the document. You can still do the nice parts of clearing context, which is available with plan mode, but you get much better control.
At all times, I make the agents work on my workflow, not try and create their own. This comes with a whole lot of trial and error, and real-life experience.
There are times when you need a tiger team made up of seniors. And others when you want to give a overzealous mid-level engineer who's fast a concrete plan to execute an important feature in a short amount of time.
I'm putting it in non-AI terms because what happens in real life pre-AI is very much what we need to replicate with AI to get the best results. Something which I would have given a bigger team to be done over two to eight sprints will get a different workflow with agent teams or agents than something which I would give a smaller tiger team or a single engineer.
They all need a plan. For me plan mode is insufficient 90% of the times.
I can appreciate that many people will not want to mess around with workflows as much as I enjoy doing.
I've only hit the compaction limit a handful of times, and my experience degraded enough that I work quite hard to not hit it again.
One thing I like about the current implementation of plan mode is that it'll clear context -- so if I complete a plan, I can use that context to write the next plan without growing context without bound.
Agreed. The only time I don't clear context after a plan has been agreed on is when I'm doing a long series of relatively small but very related changes, such as back-and-forth tweaking when I don't yet know what I really want the final result to be until I've tried stuff out. In those cases, it has very rarely been useful to compact the context, but usually I don't get close.
I really like this too - having the previous plan and implementation in place to create the next plan, but then clearing context once that next plan exists feels like a great way to have exactly the right context at the right time.
I often do follow ups, that would have been short message replies before, as plans, just so I can clear context once it’s ready. I’m hitting the context limit much less often now too.
I do have an issue with the plan mode. And nine out of ten times, it is objectively terrible. The only benefit I've seen in the past from using plan mode is it remembers more information between compactions as compared to the vanilla - non-agent team workflow.
Interestingly, though, if you ask it to maintain a running document of what you're discussing in a markdown file and make it create an evergreen task at the top of its todo list which references the markdown file and instructs itself to read it on every compaction, you get much better results.