I can’t imagine working without a plan first.

Firstly I find it’s an excellent way for me to get very good clarity about what will be built and whether it’s going to be done in a sensible way.

Very often I don’t really know what the work will need to look like until I’ve explored the problem with the LLM towards first making the plan.

Without a plan I find myself having to do the initial understanding through code review of its generated code which is much harder than reviewing a plan, and then I invariably need the LLM to fix up what it did which is much slower when it’s doing code than working on a plan, never mind the next review I need to do.

And when the plan is good enough, I clear the context before telling it do it, which I’ve found vastly improves the quality of the LLM output.