Plan first
The single habit that separates shippers from strugglers.
Every agent will happily start typing code the instant you ask. Resist. The single habit that most separates people who ship from people who fight their tools is making the agent plan before it builds.
In plan mode, the agent thinks out loud first: what it understood, what it intends to make, what steps it'll take, with zero code written. In Claude Code and Cursor, press Shift+Tab. In any tool, plain words also work: “make a plan first and wait for my approval.”
Why this is worth an entire chapter:
- –Plans surface wrong guesses while they're free. A misunderstanding caught in a plan costs one sentence. The same misunderstanding caught after the build costs a rebuild.
- –Good plans ask you questions. Scope, style, edge cases. Every question the agent asks is a guess it won't have to make. Answer thoughtfully, because this is the highest-leverage minute of the whole build.
- –Plans are cheap to iterate. “Drop the blog, add a booking form, make it one page instead of three.” Editing a plan is editing a paragraph.
A rhythm that works: plan with a heavyweight model (hard thinking), then execute with the fast tier (following a list). That's the model-tier advice from Foundations, applied.
One-file change? Just ask. Anything more, plan first. You'll break this rule, get burned, and come back to it. Everyone does.
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