Before Claude Code shipped with plan mode, the workflow for using most coding agents was to have it create a `PLAN.md` and update/execute that plan. Planning mode was just a first class version of what users were already doing.

Claude Code keeps coming out with a lot of really nice tools that others haven't started to emulate from what I've seen.

My favorite one is going through the plan interactively. It turns it into a multiple choice / option TUI and the last choose is always reprompt that section of the plan.

I had switch back to codex recently and not being able to do my planning solely in the CLI feels like the early 1900s.

To trigger the interactive mode. Do something like:

Plan a fix for:

<Problem statement>

Please walk me through any options or questions you might have interactively.

> Give it a JSON schema, inject a '{', and sometimes do a bit of custom parsing on the response

I would hope that this is not what OpenAI/Anthropic do under the hood, because otherwise, what if one of the strings needs a lot of \escapes? Is it also supposed to newer write actual newlines in strings? It's awkward.

The ideal solution would be to have some special tokens like [object_start] [object_end] and [string_start] [string_end].