Using Plan Mode to Think Before You Build

Learn how to use Claude Code’s plan mode to archi­tect fea­tures before writ­ing any code. This sep­a­rates the think­ing from the build­ing, giv­ing you a men­tal mod­el of what you’re cre­at­ing, sur­fac­ing edge cas­es before they become bugs, and pro­duc­ing share­able arti­facts you can act on, includ­ing iden­ti­fy­ing when you might need out­side help.

We use a fic­tion­al com­pa­ny that man­ages their whole­sale inven­to­ry in a Google Sheet but wants to sync the inven­to­ry to their Craft CMS brochure site. The same spread­sheet feeds their deal­er por­tal, and their print cat­a­logs. But the mar­ket­ing team also works in Craft direct­ly. They write prod­uct descrip­tions, add lifestyle pho­tog­ra­phy, opti­mize SEO con­tent, build land­ing pages for prod­uct launches.

To help us get our heads around the archi­tec­ture chal­lenges in this project, we invoke Claude Code’s plan mode and set it off to churn through what it might take to suc­ces­ful­ly pull off this project.

An overview of the take­ways in this video:

• Plan mode makes Claude a think­ing part­ner, not just a code generator
• You stay in con­trol of archi­tec­tur­al deci­sions while Claude does the research
• Com­plex projects sur­face skill gaps ear­ly, before you’re stuck halfway through
• The plan becomes shared con­text that makes imple­men­ta­tion smoother
• Your first out­put after plan­ning doesn’t have to be code, it can be documentation