Planning is 85% of the Work¶
@doodlestein -- on spending the vast majority of effort on planning, not implementation.
Key Insight¶
Emanuel describes spending 85%+ of time and energy on the planning phases. His methodology for a typical project:
- Initial plan creation using Claude Code with Opus, studying relevant existing code first
- Iterative refinement using ChatGPT Pro with extended reasoning to review the plan and suggest improvements
- Multiple review rounds integrating feedback back into the plan through 3-4 additional cycles
A real example: approximately 3 hours of planning produced a ~3,500-line markdown document.
Converting Plans to Beads¶
Once the plan reaches maturity, convert it into beads -- granular task structures with dependencies. Use the prompt:
"Create a comprehensive and granular set of beads for all this with tasks, subtasks, and dependency structure overlaid, with detailed comments."
The beads then undergo 8-9 refinement rounds, focusing on optimality, feature completeness, and comprehensive test coverage.
Why This Ratio¶
- Planning tokens are cheap; code generation tokens are expensive
- Debugging tokens from bad plans are the most expensive of all
- A well-refined plan lets multiple agents execute in parallel without conflicts
- The plan has already been stress-tested through multiple critique rounds