I too have started using plan mode less, mainly for two reasons: 1. I plan my prompt more carefully and think about architecture up front 2. I found with more recent powerful models, the clarifying questions were generally not useful because it was pointing out issues it obviously knew the answer to and would have resolved in implementation anyway. So essentially they became time-wasting and anxiety inducing for no good reason
The mental shift I made was to not accept poor understanding of a code base on my part when writing the prompt - if I don’t understand it, I can’t predict what assumptions the model will make even on a basic level.
I used to tell myself that plan mode mitigated that, but I usually ended up mentally glossing over the generated plans anyway.
That just resulted in pure anxiety-driven engineering, where I’d often spend extra cycles verifying what was built and worrying about the design.
So invest the time understanding the system, at an appropriate level. That level will change over time as models get better.