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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

Try plan mode. The problems you're speaking about are already solved.

They are nowhere near solved. Agents make serious mistakes in judgment and do it frequently enough to threaten the viability of the codebase unless you slow down and monitor them very, very closely. If you do that, it's all good. If you're not, your codebase is rotting at a superhuman speed underneath you and you have no idea until it collapses.

I agree they make mistakes in judgement, that's the whole point of plan mode. That judgement comes to the surface before lots of tokens are wasted without sight of the overall solution.

It's all very simple. "Use x library, data model should be xyz, do m, not n."

They're obviously not at the point of replacing an experienced programmer as far as knowing the start-to-finish way of accomplishing every detail, that's what the human is for.

You’re not even engaging with what they said, just repeating your theory like it’s fact. And it was, like a year ago. You do you, though.

Plan mode improves results, but it doesn't solve the underlying problems. Pretty often Claude Opus 4.7 on xhigh will formulate a reasonable enough plan, churn for a while, then come back with a summary that it didn't stick to the plan because it wasn't accurate.

Worse, the disclaimer is buried under a bunch of "did X, did Y on line Z of file a/b/c", as if it's just a minor inconvenience. To the extent the plan was inaccurate, you're left in an undefined state where you might as well undo what it just did..

You have to review the plan and fill in any missing gaps or correct anything that's wrong. Plan mode often isn't one shot, it might take a few iterations, but once the plan is nailed down, the results are usually very good.

You're right. I think having it spawn lots of subagents, read everything, formulate a big and detailed plan, only for it to be subtly wrong while requiring me to carefully review the result and the intermediate plans that produced it is quite tiring. I suppose things slip through.

If you understand these subtle pieces you perceive the AI to get wrong, you should include that in your prompt. Also, unit test and functional test coverage go a long way to ensure correct behavior.

I could also include the correct implementation for it to copy in the prompt, if you get what I'm trying to say. Some amount of laziness or vagueness in the prompt is an intended use case, it's surely the point of having the subagents do so much churning of tokens to research before writing the plan that I'm about to disregard. But sure, those are helpful tips.

I admire your perseverance, but in mid-2026, I think you’re wasting your breath. The engineers who are virulently anti-AI like this, without being able to engage honestly about the pros and cons, are being driven by their fear and insecurity.

Ostensibly, there may be a third party that benefits from the exchange, rather than the two exchanging ideas.

It is surprising to see how many are still in utter denial around here, though. Maybe we should all go back to punch cards.

How am I being virulently anti-AI? I've been a Claude Code max subscriber for many months and find it very helpful. It feels a little unfair to conclude that any criticism is just unfounded fear and insecurity..

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