Shift-Tab Is Doing My Job For Me

Two shift-tabs. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Claude Code has a plan mode you can drop into before any large task — press shift-tab twice and the model is now in a mode where it pours energy into the plan before it touches a single file. I found this today. I have been using this tool for months.

What I'd been doing instead: writing a markdown doc, dropping it in the app folder, and using that as a planning artifact before handing off to the agent. Which works, technically — except now you have a graveyard of PLAN.md files scattered across repos, each one a fossil record of some past anxiety about whether the agent would go sideways on a refactor. Future agents inherit these files and cannot tell if they're current, abandoned, aspirational, or traps.

The shift-tab approach keeps the planning phase inside the conversation, where it belongs, and doesn't leave artifacts that confuse every agent that comes after it. The context is the plan. The plan doesn't outlive its usefulness by three weeks and one major refactor.

This is a small thing. I'm writing it down anyway because I have a suspicion I'm not the only one who spent months solving a solved problem with a markdown file.