Currently looking for a framework for managing this in a more formal way, and I think it's probably beads, but interested to hear from others.

I wonder if it's just a consequence of a gigantic training set full of comments completely out-of-date with the code, leading to the model considering this "normal"

I also found that having the design reviewed by multiple agents has very little marginal value. The review agent will always find something to improve, but mostly it’s just nit and not anything super important.

I used to let Claude just upload the html design doc to Claude artifacts for me to review. Recently I switched to codex and started to use my own tool https://github.com/hyperlogue/r3 to complete this workflow.

I've tried doing the incremental, iterative approach with just Code and it's just not as effective unless you're working on something simple or experimental. Or you're shipping to something non-serious or perpetually beta.

Either way, plan mode isn’t going away. You can always /plan or ask Claude to enter plan mode. We might re-map the shift+tab keyboard shortcut to something else by default for people that don’t use plan mode.

I greatly prefer this, since it lets me iterate on the plan with Claude for a while without it repeatedly asking if I’m ready to implement the plan.

Once I’m satisfied, I usually start a fresh session and tell it to implement the plan.

For smaller plans, you don’t need the file. Just ask it to come up with a plan. I don’t recall the last time it just started implementing if I only asked for a plan.

It wastes a ton of tokens as well and those are not cheap.

Also I hope your delivery goes well. My wife (and co-founder) had a challenging delivery and it really put life in to perspective for both of us on a range of issues (how much women's pain is minimized in the health system requiring stronger personal advocacy than I would ever have expected).

As far as plan mode, I still find it essential in keeping agents on track. I build propelcode.app and have a variation on plan mode I still find useful, happy to trade notes on agentic coding if youre interested.

Can't help but think "Doesn't matter if a machine or a human with (even slightly) different background wrote it", maximizing information flow is maximizing common assumptions and "culture" to only have to communicate a small set of current information for the task at hand. Being a team means having built a joint context so to say. This has always been the purpose of design documents and they always were too big or too small. Because you did not write them, but the others. If you only produce code you think they are the past and useless. If you iterate and your team grows, you start seeing the value in always current docs that are containing just what is not in your everyday culture.

All the best for you and your growing family. I had a similar experience recalibrating my values...

Also this is a way less removed process that I want nothing to do with. The more removed I am from the process the more I hate my job, get burned out and genuinely wish that Anthropic never existed.

Even if it could "just know" or infer my intent. It wouldnt be desirable.

Edit: Oh yeah its Boris, hes one or the most disengenous shovel sellers on earth right now.

A significant (majority?) portion of developers have been shipping JavaScript/node applications for the last decade that contain hundreds of MB to GB of code from god knows where doing god knows what with dependency trees the size of redwoods. It’s not like your average mediocre dev really knew what was going on behind their gluing of frameworks together - at least from what I’ve seen.

If you have remotely competent tech leadership that enforces relatively intelligent patterns (a good one I’ve found is “write everything backend in rust”) you can make AI churn out monstrous amounts of code that… isn’t all that bad? And if you enforce it writing and updating a docs/API.md on every commit/PR you’re probably doing better than 80+% of devs I’ve ever met. Up until a few years ago it wasn’t uncommon to roll up to a new job that was a “legacy” pile of garbage concocted over 20+ years with no comments or API docs and a readme that tells you to ask for help from someone who has been dead for 5 years. At least AI code is full of comments (some of which might even be accurate) and there’s a finite (relatively low!) cost to figuring out “wtf is this doing and how is it doing it”

I.e. how hard is it to point an AI at a piece of software and say "AI, copy this"?

Seems like sooner or later copying just becomes a matter of spending enough on tokens.

Seems in that world, all significant software projects get copied. That turns software into a commodity loss leader for other business models or an open source project. Similar to the way Chrome works for Google and the way Firefox works.

This is what happens when executives suffer from AI psychosis. They were already impatient, now with AI all they care about is feature velocity.

The faster they can hit that refresh button to see the features, the quicker sales can close the deals for them.

AI has basically sold them to wet dream.

I see it kind of like baking/cooking. Do you bake your bread from scratch? Do you grow your own wheat and grist your own flour?

I think over reliance on it or not even trying to understand what is happening is a big problem to be sure, but it's certainly not a new problem.

Very true, but this also makes me think what kind of ridiculous obstacle course future hiring process would look like.

In a land where anyone with a pulse can prompt AI to make an app for them - how would future hiring managers and team leads figure out who will drag codebase down with tech debt and who wouldn't?

If you're reading and editing the code, you're not vibe coding. If you're not reading and editing the code, you're probably vibe coding even if you feel "hands on".

You can use Docker’s sbx or similar VM/containers for that.