Plan mode is dead

Ayman Nadeem's retrospective says an AI coding app called Nuanced, built around persistent plans, did not help users understand the software it was building. Early users had little appetite for the resulting specifications, AI-generated text was hard to read, and a Spec Tour meant to walk users through a spec added more text instead of clarity.

The workflow also split a process that needed to feel continuous: users chatted, approved a spec, then moved to implementation. Nadeem argues that understanding and building interleave, so planning belongs inside a loop of understanding, acting, inspecting, clarifying and adjusting rather than in a separate document. This is the author's lesson from one product, and the post says keeping people oriented while many agents change a system remains unsolved.