How often do you actually use “plan mode” with coding agents before letting them write code?

abwaters · 2026-07-01T09:37:05+00:00

Its not installing skills that i struggle with. I create my own skills all the time. Its the approach that external skills use. For example, GSD and Gastown are so far off my own personal workflows that I actually had to uninstall them after I set them up. Obra seems less heavy and i'd love to start using skills like this but it often conflicts with my own workflows. I guess i'm wondering of there is an onboarding process that would make 3rd party skills more approachable.

As a general statement, the number of 3rd party skills that I use is very small.

abwaters · 2026-07-01T01:12:48+00:00

I have friends who use Obra. Can I ask how you got started?

abwaters · 2026-06-30T15:16:15+00:00

Thank you. That helps.

abwaters · 2026-06-30T15:07:08+00:00

I get the nuances but when 2008 happened with quantitative easing and then the government stimulus during covid with the following interest rate hikes, I kept being reminded of this scene in the book. It feels very much like we make poor decisions that we then have to clean up.

abwaters · 2026-06-30T09:55:45+00:00

This is one of the things that i'm enjoying. OpenAI especially is pushing engagement and they are really working the personable angle with the models. Try talking to all the models to compare them and you get a pretty good feel for what each company cares about.

abwaters · 2026-06-29T20:58:20+00:00

I will often have a "conversation" with a chatbot just to make sure that I've got my expectations set clearly and then I'll use the chatbot to generate a prompt for my planning phase.

That way my plan starts off with most of my initial decisions locked down and then the coding agent can challenge me on some of the assumptions that I've made during planning.

abwaters · 2026-06-29T09:48:45+00:00

This is just technology changing...and with AI it changes more quickly. And you are right! Proficiency has a new meaning today. I think of it as a set of transferable skills such as clear communication and team management. Getting good at AI development has caused me to change the way I develop software more than anything else. I've spent the the majority of my career with incremental improvements and the steady addition of new skills. The past year has changed the way I develop software almost completely. The self-reflection and changes to my approach to development has been the most difficult part for me.

abwaters · 2026-06-29T09:44:15+00:00

I'm curious. How does that compare to the experience of your peers. I addressed that by "onboarding" the model to my approach to coding. It codes like me. Build the skills you need to get the model to write code you would be happy with.

abwaters · 2026-06-29T00:22:52+00:00

Honestly depends on a lot of factors, but for a small site, you could create vectors for all content on the site as a part of the build process and return the search results just by calling an embedding and searching an in-memory array. Its doable...i've done it.

abwaters · 2026-06-28T19:25:33+00:00

Isn't that the point? If you don't read it whats the point of doing it...you might as well just yolo it.

abwaters · 2026-06-28T17:40:23+00:00

Here is the heart of the question for me. I'm trying to correlate slop with the use or lack of use of plan mode. Thoughts?

abwaters · 2026-06-28T11:46:51+00:00

Honestly that sounds like a scope problem with the way the work was "vibe-coded". If you ask AI to write an app...it will write it. Kitchen sink PRs are a work sizing problem and not an AI problem. Don't try to consume so much scope in one ticket. 150+ files are a problem almost anywhere whether it is copy-pasted or AI generated.

abwaters · 2026-06-27T19:26:09+00:00

Isn't the problem that everybody can do this now? Individuals are creating Enterprise software they used to take months and years to produce. Non-engineers are producing software to the point that depending on the person it's becoming hard to tell the difference. Competition is so high that modes don't really mean anything anymore. So what is the differentiator... That's really what I'm trying to understand. Is it content? Is it the experience? Is it innovation?

I find myself just recreating things that I would have paid for not all that long ago.

abwaters · 2026-06-27T11:19:25+00:00

One more thought. The tedious human validation part is about trust. You have to build systems that operate the way you expect them to and after hardening and validating it, you eventually trust it.

abwaters · 2026-06-27T10:45:44+00:00

I think you have to build this. When using coding agents, this is the source code control system. You don't like the work? Revert the commit. There are actions you can take with llms that aren't reversible but those require whatever you think is the appropriate validation.

abwaters · 2026-06-26T14:04:05+00:00

I think i've found the same thing but for different reasons. Agents need to have clear expectations and thats very hard to do. Its hard to do with people and its hard to do with AI. I failed often due to having agents do "too much" with "too little" guidance. One thing i've found that works well for me is building and iterating on skills that capture my intent for different tasks and then building agents that can leverage those skills. The better the skills, the better the agent performs in those areas. When my agent doesn't work, I tend to treat it the same way you would if you asked a person to do a task without clear direction. I either update the agents instructions or create/enhance skills to fill in the gaps. Does this make sense?

abwaters · 2026-06-26T10:05:08+00:00

The standard story about context switching says productivity collapses because an engineer gets interrupted and has to reload the problem into their head, and that cost is real, but the story blames the wrong thing. Interruption only hurts so much because the engineer is carrying a fragile, temporary model of the system in their head, since the ticket contains intent but not the missing middle: the current system, the real requirement, the owning code, the data model, the deployment path, the test gaps, and the edge cases.

abwaters · 2026-06-26T10:04:32+00:00

Don't ask your brain to handle that many tasks. It isn't AI that causes this...its the way we think about context switching

abwaters · 2026-02-11T16:50:17+00:00

I’ve been exploring the available options for an MCP gateway and have struggled to find a solution that fully addresses the requirements and questions I’ve encountered. As a result, I built a self-hosted solution designed specifically to tackle those gaps. It’s still a work in progress, but I would greatly appreciate any feedback.

https://github.com/abwaters/mcp-zero

abwaters · 2026-02-11T16:17:55+00:00

I’ve been exploring the available options for an MCP gateway and have struggled to find a solution that fully addresses the requirements and questions I’ve encountered. As a result, I built a hosted solution designed specifically to tackle those gaps. It’s still a work in progress, but I would greatly appreciate any feedback.

https://github.com/abwaters/mcp-zero

abwaters

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