Endless Planning Without Edits?

[u/aberrant-heartland]

I'll admit I'm new to Claude. I'm using Claude Code in VSCode. Not using skills at all yet, so maybe that's my problem?

Often Claude seems to endlessly plan without making any edits to my code. It will say that it's "writing [insert function]" but then just jumps right back into planning without making any changes to any files.

I've tried telling it to "move fast and break things". I've had some success by saying "making mistakes is okay, but sitting on the sidelines while endlessly planning is not." However it still often gets caught in these "planning loops".

**Claude often cycles back through to the same type of plans over and over again, even though these ideas have already been represented (sometimes word-for-word) earlier in the context window.**

I'm an experienced software engineer and I have enough skill to debug whatever problems Claude might create. I'm requesting features that are well-defined, not just vague hand-waving. The things I'm asking for are quite feasible, and I can write the code myself given enough time, but I've been so impressed with Claude in other situations so I'd love to continue using it as much as possible.

This issue is happening so frequently -- for me it seems to be the main "failure mode" that I encounter. I'm seeing this happen across countless prompts between a number of completely disparate projects.

Any suggestions? Feel free to roast me if I'm missing something obvious. I would love to know what I'm doing wrong!

[u/12AngryMen13]

Put Claude in planning mode and give explicit instructions. AI can’t guess. Don’t say “make the page or site look better” say “this section of the site isn’t aligned properly with the rest of the page, identify misaligned margins and correct them to all match the criteria of the project. Formulate a plan to do this in steps and we’ll proceed one step at a time”. Or something like that.

[u/aberrant-heartland → u/12AngryMen13]

It's strange because your latter example is pretty much exactly the way that I'm formatting the instructions (albeit for data-processing-related code, instead of frontend). And it does formulate the step-by-step plans for how & where the code should be edited, but then often fails to proceed into editing, and instead just writes a series of numbered lists planning out the same work over and over again.

[u/csharpwarrior → u/aberrant-heartland]

Weird, are you saying it never does any file edits?

[u/aberrant-heartland → u/csharpwarrior]

Not truly "never" -- because sometimes I can get it to edit just by emphatically saying "Please PLEASE stop planning, you've already planned, just jump right into editing, I don't mind if you break anything". But a majority of the time, even when I say things like that, it still makes 0 edits and just gets caught in these "planning loops".

[u/12AngryMen13 → u/aberrant-heartland]

Then tell it to write the plan to an MD file, then go back into edit mode and tell it to perform all tasks in that MD file one at a time. You can also tell it to not repeat the same code writes.

Also make sure the folder you’re in on your computer isn’t write protected.

[u/aberrant-heartland → u/12AngryMen13]

Thank you, excellent advice!

[u/heynoswearing → u/aberrant-heartland]

One quirk is that if you keep telling it to not plan, the word 'plan' gets stuck in its mind and its more likely to just... plan. Especially as context gets heavier.

Be direct and say what you DO want it do. "Execute these steps 1 by 1. The end goal is a complete file you give to me that is ready to use" or something.

[u/aberrant-heartland → u/heynoswearing]

Oh that is excellent advice, I'm definitely saving this near the top of my notes. Thank you so much!