You give an AI coding agent a one-line prompt. Ten seconds later you have a hundred lines of code. It feels incredible. It feels like the future.
Then you read it. It's not what you meant. So you correct it. Then you correct the correction. Three rounds of "no, not like that" later, you've spent twenty minutes walking the model back to the thing you could have described in the first place.
That fast first draft wasn't progress. It was rework in disguise.
How Anthropic's engineers actually work
The people building the models don't work the way most of us use them. Anthropic's own engineering workflow is four steps: explore, plan, implement, verify. And they're explicit about which one carries the weight. Planning is, in their words, the most important step of the four.
