This is very interesting as a workflow. How “big” are the asks you’re giving Claude? Can you give an example of the type of question you’d ask it to implement where it requires a discrete planning document that long?
Whenever I use it, I typically do much smaller asks, eg “add a button here”, “make that button trigger a refresh with a filter of such state…”
The best results I get are for things like writing a new database migration and plumbing the data through to an API endpoint. That touches a lot of the codebase, but is not particularly complicated, so this process works quite well for that. Especially because it is easy for me to review.
I have also used this for creating new UI components or admin pages. One thing I have noticed is that the planning step is pretty good at searching through existing UI components to follow their patterns to maintain consistency. If I just asked Claude to make the change straight away, it often won't follow the patterns of our codebase.
But for UI components, adding new pages, or things like that, it is usually more useful just as a starting point and I will often need to go in and tweak things from there. But often it is a pretty good starting point. And if it's not, I can just discard the changes anyway.
I find this is not worth it for very small tasks though, like adding a simple button or making a small behaviour change to a UI component. It will usually overcomplicate these small tasks and add in big testing rigs or performance optimisations, or other irrelevant concerns. It is like it doesn't want to produce a very short plan. So, for things like this I will use Claude interactively, or just make the change manually. Honestly, even if it did do a good job at these small tasks, it would still seem like overkill.
Here's an example of me doing a migration from Deno -> Bun, prompting with something like "migrate this, make a plan in BUN.md" and then "do step 1 and write your progress, do step 2, etc."
Whenever I use it, I typically do much smaller asks, eg “add a button here”, “make that button trigger a refresh with a filter of such state…”