Plan Mode Is Dead(aymannadeem.com) |
Plan Mode Is Dead(aymannadeem.com) |
Qwen 3.8 27b is the supervisor
Qwen 3.5 4b are the 6-15 minions it controls
Gemma 4 e4b is the validator for the supervisor.
A plan means it preps all work for the agents up front, tests that evals work, makes sure the dev environment is right for each agent, then finds and fixes each before the distributed tasks even begin.
What I thought would take minutes took hours as a supervisor or one agent did the prep / pre flight work.
My solution so far has been to drop all but basic setup and force the supervisor to ask before every op - if this is not the design choices, can this be run in parallel? If so, hand it off NOW.
I'm still iterating this workflow, but less setup for all the minions plus handing them work that may be incomplete/ broken is caught and fixed by the minion and its own qa gates.
This can mean a number of minions end up replicating the same fixes, but in general the time cost of that is small Vs the supervisor working in parallel instead of too sequentially.
I also find this "kill Plan mode" push on Twitter odd, because developers have been complaining about AI supposedly killing their jobs, yet they want to take away the main feature that lets them be an active collaborator and participator in the process. Weird.
Maybe it's me (it usually is), but I don't give an LLM small tasks that a human could knock out in a half-day. I give them big tasks, stuff that would take a human a few months to a year - and then I ask it to give me a plan, as a living document, and we spend a good hour or two iterating over the plan.
Then, when its finally at the point where I'm happy with the plan, and I've talked it down from wherever it first wanted to go, or pointed out that we don't need to be all-things-to-all-(wo)men and focus is important, I get it to start going through it.
Likewise, I get it to maintain TODO.md with lists of known bugs, separate lists of future-features, and again, I make a rule that this file must be updated whenever something material changes. I just asked Claude "where are we ?" and got back stuff like:
The ## Still-open detail section lists two items:
- Task #1070: the ported back end doesn't fold offsets into vector loads, so it emits an extra add on 11 files (from 892) at -O3. The output is correct, just longer.
- Task #1080: array sizes must constant-fold. For example, u8 buf[EVSZ * MAXEV] is rejected because size expressions only accept a literal.
This is for 'xc' [1] - a compiler for an Objective-C-like language (but without the excessive []). The language has ARC, blocks and bound-functions/methods named 'block' and 'callback', automatic parsing of DWARF data so you can #use a shared-object, so there's no header files - just read enums/types/functions/methods from the shared object. It's a cross-compiler, runs on mac,windows,linux and creates executables for mac,windows,linux,ios,android,WASM (amongst others). I have a binary running on my iPhone which was written on, and signed on a Linux box - no Apple software used at all. Oh, and it produces code that is very comparable to clang in speed on both arm64 and x86_64.
You can appreciate it's a reasonably large project. It's taken actual months(!) [grin] for me to get working. Months! There's no way I'd approach a problem like this without detailed plans of what I wanted the language to do, where we were going with it
FWIW, "I" wrote blewit.net [2] entirely in xc - both the server back-end (#use <psql> was very useful for binding to Postgres) and the WASM client - which share classes between client and back end, to make it very difficult to get out-of-step between them. No Apache (#use <tls>), no scripting, just a lean-and-mean daemon talking to postgres via valkey (#use <valkey>) - a reddis-alike. Oh yeah, blewit.net has a plan too. Actually it has lots of planning :)