[dceddia]

Interesting about the level of detail. I’ve noticed that myself but I haven’t done much to address it yet.

I can imagine some ideas (ask it for more detail, ask it to make a smaller plan and add detail to that) but I’m curious if you have any experience improving those plans.

[stingraycharles]

I’m trying to solve this myself by implementing a whole planner workflow at https://github.com/solatis/claude-config

Effectively it tries to resolve all ambiguities by making all decisions explicit — if the source cannot be resolved to documentation or anything, it’s asked to the user.

It also tries to capture all “invisible knowledge” by documenting everything, so that all these decisions and business context are captured in the codebase again.

Which - in theory - should make long term coding using LLMs more sane.

The downside is that it takes 30min - 60min to write a plan, but it’s much less likely to make silly choices.

[ElFitz]

Have you tried the compound engineering plugin? [^1]

My workflow with it is usually brainstorm -> lfg (planning) -> clear context -> lfg (giving it the produced plan to work on) -> compound if it didn’t on its own.

[^1]: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

[stingraycharles]

That’s super interesting, I’ll take a look to see if I can learn something from it, as I’m not familiar with the concept of compound engineering.

Seems like a lot of it aligns with what I’m doing, though.

[throwup238]

> The downside is that it takes 30min - 60min to write a plan

Oof you weren't kidding. I've got your skills running on a particularly difficult problem and it's been running for over three hours (I keep telling it to increase the number of reviews until its satisfied).

[stingraycharles]

Yeah I’m working on some improvements in this area, should make things faster. But yeah I’ve frequently had 1h-2h planning sessions as well, depending upon the complexity of the task.

[colelyman]

I have had good success with the plans generated by https://github.com/obra/superpowers I also really like the Socratic method it uses to create the plans.

[vardalab]

I iterate around issues. I have a skill to launch a new tmux window for worktree with Claude in one pane and Codex in another pane with instructions on which issue to work on, Claude has instructions to create a plan, while Codex has instructions to understand the background information necessary for this issue to be worked on. By the time they're both done, then I can feed Claude's plan into Codex, and Codex is ready to analyze it. And then Codex feeds the plan back to Claude, and they kind of ping pong like that a couple times. And after a certain or several iterations, there's enough refinement that things usually work. Then Claude clears context and executes the plan. Then Codex reviews the commit and it still has all the original context so it knows what we have been planning and what the research was about the infrastructure. And it does a really good job reviewing. And again, then they ping pong back and forth a couple times, and the end product is pretty decent. Codex's strength is that it really goes in-depth. I usually do this at a high reasoning effort. But Codex has zero EQ or communication skills, so it works really well as a pedantic reviewer. Claude is much more pleasant to interact with. There's just no comparison. That's why I like planning with Claude much more because we can iterate.. I am just a hobbyist though. I do this to run my Ansible/Terraform infrastructure for a good size homelab with 10 hosts. So we actually touch real hardware a lot and there's always some gotchas to deal with. But together, this is a pretty fun way to work. I like automating stuff, so it really scratches that itch.