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Level 7: Bigger Tasks
Lesson 3 · +10 XP

Reading a plan critically

You’ve got a plan in front of you. Here’s the trap: it looks thorough, it’s neatly numbered, it sounds confident — so you hit approve. Then you spend the next hour fighting the thing you just approved.

A plan is not a contract. It’s a draft. Its entire value is that it’s still cheap to argue with — and arguing is the point, not approving.

The plan is the cheapest place you will ever find a disagreement. Once the work runs, every disagreement costs a revert. Right now, it costs a sentence. So read it like you’re looking for trouble.

The four things to scan for

  • Wrong assumptions. Claude guessed about something you actually know. “I’ll store the setting in localStorage” — but your app already has a settings table. It didn’t know; now you tell it.
  • Missing edge cases. The plan handles the happy path and forgets the rest. What about the empty state? The error case? The user who’s already signed in?
  • Scope creep. The plan is “helpfully” doing more than you asked — refactoring nearby code, renaming things, deleting files you never mentioned. Helpful-sounding, expensive in practice.
  • Things it should have asked. Where should this file live? What should it be named? Which library? If Claude picked when it should have asked, the plan is where you catch it.

What this looks like

Say you asked for a logout button, and the plan comes back:

  1. Add a logout button to the header.
  2. Wire it to the /api/logout endpoint.
  3. Redirect to /login after logout.
  4. Delete the old session-management code in auth/session.ts.

Steps 1–3 are the button you asked for. Step 4 is something else entirely — a refactor that deletes code, which you never requested. That’s textbook scope creep, and it’s exactly the kind of thing a plan exists to surface before it runs. You reply: “Skip step 4 — don’t touch the session code, just add the button.”

That one sentence just saved you from debugging why your sessions broke an hour from now.

How to push back

You don’t need special syntax. Plain English, specific:

  • “Use react-hook-form, not Formik.”
  • “Don’t touch the auth code — leave session.ts alone.”
  • “What happens to users who are already logged in?”
  • “Put the new component in components/, not at the top level.”

Claude revises the plan and shows you again. You’re still in plan mode; still nothing has changed. You can go around as many times as you need. The going-around is the work right now.

What’s next

Once you approve a plan, Claude starts working — and for a multi-step task, it’ll often keep a running checklist you can watch. The next lesson is what that checklist is, and why it’s quietly one of your most useful tools.