Plan mode

Plan mode lets tCode fully explore and reason about a change before anything is actually done, useful whenever a request is large enough, or ambiguous enough, that you would rather review the approach first than approve individual edits as they come.

/plan

What happens once plan mode is active

Once plan mode is active, tCode keeps working exactly as it normally would, reading files, searching, following how something is actually used across your project, but every action that would otherwise change something, a write, an edit, a command, is recorded instead of executed.

When it matters most

This matters most for changes where the right approach genuinely is not obvious yet, a refactor that touches several files in ways that depend on each other, a fix where more than one root cause looks plausible, a feature where the natural place to add it is not clear until you have actually looked at how similar things are structured elsewhere in the codebase.

Exiting plan mode

This exits plan mode and shows you the complete plan that was assembled.

Still grounded in real investigation

Because read-only tools still run normally in plan mode, the plan that comes out the other end is grounded in the same real investigation an ordinary turn would have done, not a guess made without looking.

Scoped to the session, not saved as a setting

Plan mode is scoped to the session, not saved as a setting: it needs to be entered explicitly with /plan each time you want it, and stays active across as many messages as you send until you exit it, so you can go back and forth refining what you are asking for before committing to anything, the entire back-and-forth still happening without a single file changing.

Nothing learned is discarded on exit

Exiting plan mode does not discard what was learned during it.

A reasonable habit for when to reach for it

A reasonable habit is to reach for plan mode by default on anything you are not fully certain about the shape of yet, and skip it for anything you already know exactly how to describe.

Plan mode versus thinking effort

Plan mode is not the same as a lower effort level or a more cautious mode of operation generally, it specifically changes whether actions run or get recorded, not how carefully the model reasons about them.