[chaboud]

It's this line that I'm bristling at: "...the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools..."

Anyone who spends some time with these tools (and doesn't black out from smashing their head against their desk) is going to find substantial benefit in planning with clarity.

It was #6 in Boris's run-down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46470017

So, yes, I'm glad that people write things out and share. But I'd prefer that they not lead with "hey folks, I have news: we should *slice* our bread!"

[copirate]

But the author's workflow is actually very different from Boris'.

#6 is about using plan mode whereas the author says "The built-in plan mode sucks".

The author's post is much more than just "planning with clarity".

[locknitpicker]

> The author's post is much more than just "planning with clarity".

Not much more, though.

It introduces "research", which is the central topic of LLMs since they first arrived. I mean, LLMs coined the term "hallucination", and turned grounding into a key concept.

In the past, building up context was thought to be the right way to approach LLM-assisted coding, but that concept is dead and proven to be a mistake, like discussing the best way to force a round peg through the square hole, but piling up expensive prompts to try to bridge the gap. Nowadays it's widely understood that it's far more effective and way cheaper to just refactor and rearchitect apps so that their structure is unsurprising and thus grounding issues are no longer a problem.

And planning mode. Each and every single LLM-assisted coding tool built their support for planning as the central flow and one that explicitly features iterations and manual updates of their planning step. What's novel about the blog post?

[copirate]

A detailed workflow that's quite different from the other posts I've seen.

[locknitpicker]

> A detailed workflow that's quite different from the other posts I've seen.

Seriously? Provide context with a prompt file, prepare a plan in plan mode, and then execute the plan? You get more detailed descriptions of this if you read the introductory how-to guides of tools such as Copilot.

[copirate]

Making the model write a research file, then the plan and iterate on it by editing the plan file, then adding the todo list, then doing the implementation, and doing all that in a single conversation (instead of clearing contexts).

There's nothing revolutionary, but yes, it's a workflow that's quite different from other posts I've seen, and especially from Boris' thread that was mentioned which is more like a collection of tips.

[locknitpicker]

> Making the model write a research file

Having LLMs write their prompt files was something that became a thing the moment prompt files became a thing.

> then the plan and iterate on it by editing the plan file, then adding the todo list, then doing the implementation, and doing all that in a single conversation (instead of clearing contexts).

That's literally what planning mode is.

Do yourself a favor and read the announcement of support for planning mode in Visual Studio. Visual Studio code supported it months before.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/introducing-plan...

[mnicky]

Since some time, Claude Codes's plan mode also writes file with a plan that you could probably edit etc. It's located in ~/.claude/plans/ for me. Actually, there's whole history of plans there.

I sometimes reference some of them to build context, e.g. after few unsuccessful tries to implement something, so that Claude doesn't try the same thing again.

[amelius]

The author __is__ Boris ...

[copirate]

They are different Boris. I was using the names already used in this thread.

[Forgeties79]

I would say he’s saying “hey folks, I have news. We should slice our bread with a knife rather than the spoon that came with the bread.”

[locknitpicker]

> Anyone who spends some time with these tools (and doesn't black out from smashing their head against their desk) is going to find substantial benefit in planning with clarity.

That's obvious by now, and the reason why all mainstream code assistants now offer planning mode as a central feature of their products.

It was baffling to read the blogger making claims about what "most people" do when anyone using code assistants already do it. I mean, the so called frontier models are very expensive and time-consuming to run. It's a very natural pressure to make each run count. Why on earth would anyone presume people don't put some thought into those runs?