More recently I've been doing the implement phase without resetting the whole context when context is still < 60% full and must say I find it to be a better workflow in many cases (depends a bit on the size of the plan I suppose.)

It's faster because it has already read most relevant files, still has the caveats / discussion from the research phase in its context window, etc.

With the context clear the plan may be good / thorough but I've had one too many times that key choices from the research phase didn't persist because halfway through implementation Opus runs into an issue and says "You know what? I know a simpler solution." and continues down a path I explicitly voted down.

That's fascinating: that is identical to the workflow I've landed on myself.

> RESEARCH. Don't code yet. Let the agent scan the files first. Docs lie. Code doesn't.

I find myself often running validity checks between docs and code and addressing gaps as they appear to ensure the docs don’t actually lie.

Add a REFLECT phase after IMPLEMENT. I’m finding it’s extremely useful to ask agents for implementation notes and for code reviews. These are different things, and when I ask for implementation notes I get very different output than the implementation summary it spits out automatically. I ask the agent to surface all design choices it had to make that we didn’t explicitly discuss in the plan, and then check in the plan + impl notes in order to help preload context for the next thing.

My team has been adopting a separation of plan & implement organically, we just noticed we got better output that way, plus Claude now suggests in plan mode to clear context first before implementing. We are starting to do team reviews on the plan before the implement phase. It’s often helpful to get more eyeballs on the plan and improve it.

How is that Plan strategy not "outsourcing your thinking" because that's exactly what it sounds like. AI does the heavy lifting and you are the editor.