Plan mode was great, but I realized I progressed well beyond it. I found that I was getting these categories repeated errors and oversights from Claude (and frankly it hasn't gotten much better about this). Skills were too generic and got lost to context.

I ended up building out tool an MCP server that I use as a bit of a psuedo harness for Claude. I have a variety of multi-step workflows that are basically micro-skills stacked on top of each other. This helps me make sure that I can get Claude to think in a repeatable and reliable manner.

For coding, I've found that I have a few specific steps that Claude needs to do before I'm comfortable letting it loose:

* It must extensively explore the code base (including certain areas that it misses)

* It must think about what it doesn't know or is making assumptions about

* It MUST scaffold out it's intentions. Essentially, it can write comments, classes, and method stubs - but no actual content. Very much like a spec, but since it's in and alongside other code, it's much easier to identify problems.

* It must spike and validate key assumptions. This, plus the prior step, are the only way I've figured out how to avoid it ending up in a confusion loop. Too often it looks at poor-quality code it's written and thinks it's a long-term solution. By avoiding writing code as much as possible, it knows that it's draft content.

* Only, then can I review it and send it it.

Said MCP server (missing the actual ops): https://github.com/clops-mcp/clops-mcp