Plan mode in Claude Code fixed the thing I hated most about coding agents

My earlier experience with agents was that they would sprint off and write two hundred lines before I understood what they were even doing, and unwinding that mess cost more than doing it myself. Claude Code's plan mode flipped that. Now I make it lay out the approach first, I read it, and I catch the bad assumption while it is still one paragraph instead of one commit. The other day it planned to touch a shared config I did not want changed, and I killed that in the plan stage in five seconds. The discipline of read the plan, then approve, has saved me hours of cleanup. Does anyone actually let it run without reviewing the plan first?