What happens once plan mode is active

Once plan mode is entered with /plan, tCode keeps working exactly the way it normally would: reading files, searching, following how something is actually used across your project.

The one thing that changes is that every action that would otherwise change something, a write, an edit, a command, is recorded as a proposed step instead of being executed. Nothing is skipped and nothing fails silently in the process.

The model sees clearly that its intended action was added to the plan rather than run, and continues building out the rest of the plan around that fact, reasoning about subsequent steps as if the recorded one had actually happened, since logically it will, once you approve it.

The recorded plan is not a vague summary of intent; each entry corresponds to a real, specific tool call that was fully formed, a particular file, a particular edit, a particular command, just deferred rather than run immediately.

This is why the plan you eventually review is concrete enough to actually approve as-is: it is not a rough sketch that still needs to be fleshed out, it is the same level of detail an ordinary turn's actions would have had, simply collected together first.