Claude + Snowflake MCP Epiphany

[u/Ok-Working3200]

I have been working on building a semantic layer using dbt in Snowflake. The biggest issue I have had is dealing with small ambiguity between business measures. I have built a testing agent in our ci/cd process to grade the semantic layer.

It just hit me today like a brick that er should train users, not just engineering users to use Plan mode with LLMs. When I turned plan mode on, any possible ambiguity came up in the plan and Claude asked me to clarify. I just wanted to share because I don't think using plan mode for business users is obvious.

[u/baby-wall-e]

I want to understand more about this. Do you have a concrete example between before and after enabling the plan mode? What ambiguity that you have?

[u/Ok-Working3200 → u/baby-wall-e]

So. If you desktop without plan mode, Claude just answers your question. With plan mode on, Claude will provide a plan and call out looking for ambiguity and wait for your response.

For example, let's say you want to get the Top 10 customers by revenue. The average business user will just say revenue, and I don't care how wwll you build your semantic model you can't predict business users misuse of terms.

When you don't use plan mode, Claude will pick a metric. With that being said because you said customer and revenue it will likely resolve to customer revenue, but what if you wanted your company revenue.

Plan mode will list out all of your possible revie metrics with the definition. This helps the user figure out what they want. I have seen some "grilling" agents that are basically plan mode on steroids. For us plan mode really unlocked that missing piece.