I likewise don't understand this push. Surely it's a trivial feature to keep enabled. It mostly seems like advertising that "our models are so smart you don't need to plan". But I find it to be a great mental review process for my workflow.
It sounds like the Ant perspective is "you can just ask claude to plan", but at the same time that's a little more tedious than shift+tab
I see what you mean, but I’m saying something else, I think plan modes were solving two different problems:
1. giving the agent sufficiently precise instructions
2. helping the human understand what’s being built
I think #1 is increasingly going away as models get better. #2 is a separate problem, and I actually think it matters more as agents get more capable. I’m not arguing that human understanding should disappear with plan mode.
I’m also not pushing this on behalf of a model lab, I don’t represent one. These are lessons I learned from my own mistakes building Nuanced (https://www.nuanced.dev). We built around a very explicit plan-oriented workflow because that’s how I used to work. I spent years at GitHub writing ADRs, RFCs, and design docs, and I still really like writing because it’s how I clarify my own thinking.
What changed for me is that AI-generated plans don’t give me that same effect. The agent reads between the lines, generates a lot of detailed prose, and now I’m parsing decisions and assumptions I didn’t actually make.
So I still think human understanding deserves a first-class primitive. I’m just increasingly unconvinced that a big blob of generated text is the right one, especially as we move toward many agents working in parallel.
It sounds like the Ant perspective is "you can just ask claude to plan", but at the same time that's a little more tedious than shift+tab