The explore → plan → code → commit workflow
To be effective with Claude Code, follow the Explore, Plan, Code, and Commit workflow:
- Explore gives Claude the relevant context it needs for your project.
- Plan creates a plan of action that Claude uses to measure success.
- Code is the back and forth between you and Claude before settling on the final outcome.
- Commit helps you review and push your code so you can start on your next feature.
Explore and Plan
The fastest way to handle these first two steps is with Plan Mode.
In plan mode, Claude can’t edit files — it just reads files to gather information about how it will tackle the implementation.
Claude will read relevant files, run some web searches, and give you a plan of action. Review it and decide if it meets your criteria. If not, ask it to revise specific areas.
This is the best place to course-correct because it’s before any code is written.
You can also run the explore subagent without being in plan mode if you just want a general summary of your codebase without intending to make changes afterward.
Code
Once the plan looks good, select “approve” to accept it and let Claude work through the list items. Your permission mode determines how Claude proceeds: it can ask you at each step, auto-accept file edits, or run in auto mode with a background safety check screening each action.
Claude will do its best to troubleshoot before considering the plan “finished,” but at times you’ll need to step in.
Tips to make the coding phase smoother:
Define a success criteria.
For Claude to be confident in its results, it needs to be clear on what “correct” looks like. Make this explicit when writing your plan.
Add tools.
Tools that help Claude complete its goals remove a lot of back and forth. For example, if you’re building web UIs, install the Claude in Chrome extension so Claude Code can control a browser tab and test the UI directly.
Include a test suite.
Give Claude a test suite it can continuously validate against. Claude can even write tests for you. Before handing this off, make sure the tests are a reliable source of truth to avoid false positives.
If you find Claude keeps running into the same issues, ask it to save the solution to its CLAUDE.md file.
Commit
Once you’ve tested the changes yourself and are happy with the results, it’s time to push your code.
Before you commit, run a subagent code reviewer to look at your work. A subagent gets a fresh pair of eyes on the codebase — it doesn’t carry the bias the main agent might have from the session.
Then get Claude to generate a commit message in your style.