imho the plans of Claude Code are not detailed enough to pull this off; they’re trying to do it to preserve context, but the level of detail in the plans is not nearly enough for it to be reliable.
You start to get a sense for what size plan (in kilobytes) corresponds to what level of effort. Verification adds effort, and there's a sort of ... Rocket equation? in that the more infrastructure you put in to handle like ... the logistics of the plan, the less you have for actual plan content, which puts a cap on the size of an actionable plan. If you can hit the sweet spot though... GTFO.
I also like to iterate several times in plan mode with Claude before just handing the whole plan to Codex to melt with a superlaser. Claude is a lot more ... fun/personable to work with? Codex is a force of nature.
Another important thing I will do is now that launching plans clear context, it's good to get out of planning mode early, hit an underspecified bit, go back into planning mode and say something like "As you can see the plan was underspecified, what will the next agent actually need to succeed?" and iterate that way before we actually start making moves. This is made possible by lots of explicit instructions in CLAUDE.md for Claude to tell me what it's planning/thinking before it acts. Suppressing the toolcall reflex and getting actual thought out helps so much.
Not sure how well it’s working though (my agents haven’t used 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.
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.
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
Seems like a lot of it aligns with what I’m doing, though.
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).
You can make a template and tell Claude to make a plan that follows the template.