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In plan mode Claude reads and proposes, and edits stay blocked until you approve.
Enter it with /plan or Shift+Tab. Use it when you cannot yet describe the diff in one sentence.
/plan
Planning
One at a time. Tell it whether you knew, and the ones you did not stay in your pile.
The whole topic6
In plan mode Claude reads and proposes, and edits stay blocked until you approve.
Enter it with
/planor Shift+Tab. Use it when you cannot yet describe the diff in one sentence.Ctrl+G opens the plan in your own editor.
You can rewrite the plan like a document before approving it.
Ask Claude to interview you until it could write a spec.
It writes
SPEC.md, and you build from it in a fresh session so the build starts with a clean window."Think step by step" is plain text, not a keyword.
Effort level is the real control. The one prompt wording that still helps is "be ambitious", because it signals scope, not thinking depth.
Effort runs from low to max, and max tends to overthink.
Medium for everyday work, high or xhigh for subtle bugs and schema changes, low for quick back and forth, max only for hard unattended problems.
opusplanplans with Opus and executes with Sonnet, and every toggle resets the cache.Each plan-mode toggle becomes a model switch, and each model has its own cache.