Session 3
Plan Mode's Gift and Trap
Plan mode correctly forces think-before-code. Formal plan dumps often make you lose the decision.
- Keep plan mode's attention redirect without worshipping the document
- Spot when a formal plan is fog you are about to approve
- Retell a plan in your own words before continuing
- See why human focus fails on dense dumps
A situation you may recognize
You open plan mode for soft delete. Good instinct. Session 2’s attention redirect, productized.
The plan arrives as a dense technical dump: migration names, service layers, edge cases, file paths, nested bullets. It looks responsible. You skim. Something feels off, but the structure is impressive enough that questioning it feels like slowing down for no reason.
You approve.
Implementation starts. Halfway through, you realize the plan assumed cascades you never wanted. Changing direction is now expensive. The plan document is still sitting there looking professional.
The gift
Plan mode’s gift is real: it aims the agent away from “start coding” and toward “propose a path.” That matches Session 1 and Session 2. Products built this stage because jumping straight to code fails often enough.
Keep that gift.
The trap
The trap is treating the document as finished thinking.
Humans have small working memory. A formal wall of plan burns capacity on parsing structure: headings, jargon, nested lists, while the actual decision (“Door A or Door B?”) gets lost. You can skim a plan and still not feel the choice. Approving fog is not directing. It is rubber-stamping because it looks like work happened.
| Plan mode gift | Plan mode trap |
|---|---|
| Forces think-before-code | Produces a dump that is hard to own |
| Surfaces a candidate path | Hides the decision inside professionalism |
| Creates a stage to challenge | Invites “looks official → approve” |
Research on cognitive load and progressive disclosure points the same way: dumping everything at once raises extraneous load. Conversation and smaller chunks often fit human decision-making better than one formal novel. Session 4 builds that habit. This session only asks you to stop equating “plan mode ran” with “I directed.”
If you cannot retell it, you are not ready to approve it. Ask for a shorter plain-language version, or talk through one fork at a time. A plan you cannot explain is a plan you cannot direct.
What to ask plan mode for instead
You can still use plan mode. Aim its output:
Propose 2-3 high-level roads for soft delete.
For each: plain summary, main risk, blast radius.
Recommend one. Do not implement.
Keep it short enough that I can retell it.A useful answer looks more like doors than a spec dump:
Door A:
deleted_aton users, filter defaults, block login, admin restore.
Door B: archive table. Cleaner history, wider blast radius.
Door C: status enum + purge job. Extra ops surface.
Recommend A for smallest safe change. Blast radius: auth, user lists, sessions. Billing untouched if we refuse cascades.
That you can challenge. That you can own.
Before Session 4
Session 4 is the conversational alternative to drowning in the dump: talk in small bites so cognition stays offloaded into pieces you can hold.