00:00:00So, a few months ago, I made a video about Superpowers, a Claude's Code plugin that,
00:00:05in my opinion, does a better job of planning features than the built-in plan mode.
00:00:11But now the team have released UltraPlan, which works by moving the plan from the CLI
00:00:15to Claude's Code on the web, which will clone your repo in a cloud environment and write
00:00:20a detailed plan for you to implement in the cloud or back on your machine.
00:00:25Which is all very cool, so hit subscribe and let's see if I think this new way of planning
00:00:29is better than using Superpowers and better than playing Pokemon.
00:00:33[Music]
00:00:37Annoyingly, at the time of recording this video, the Claude team have just released Claude Routines
00:00:42and they've also redesigned the Claude Code desktop app.
00:00:44And topic, why do you move so fast?
00:00:46Anyway, this video is about the UltraPlan feature, so let's get straight into it.
00:00:50So the focus of this demo is to write a plan for this product, which is a CLI tool I'm working
00:00:56on that does film emulation, I'll add a link to it in the description if you're interested.
00:01:01But this plan is to focus on building a release pipeline.
00:01:04I'll start with using the new UltraPlan feature and then compare the plan.
00:01:08So in order to use UltraPlan, you need to have at least this version of Claude Code and you
00:01:12can use it with the /ultraplan command, or you can just write UltraPlan, which will give
00:01:17it this nice rainbow effect, similar to UltraThink.
00:01:21Then I'm going to paste in a prompt to build the release pipeline.
00:01:24I've also told it not to use the superpower skill so that it can focus on just using the
00:01:29Claude UltraPlan feature.
00:01:31But before I hit enter, let's take a look at my usage percentage, which you can see is set
00:01:36to zero before Claude has done any planning.
00:01:38So now if I hit enter, it asks me if I want to run the interactive plan on the web, which
00:01:43I'm going to say yes to, and it looks like the UltraPlan creation failed at about 4% usage.
00:01:48So I'm going to run the exact same prompt in debug mode, which has now given me this
00:01:52link to view it in the browser.
00:01:54But I'm actually going to view it in the newly redesigned Claude Code format, and I'm going
00:01:58to close the sidebar, and we can see that it first set up a cloud container, and then it
00:02:02cloned the repo.
00:02:03I forgot to mention, to use UltraPlan, your project repo needs to be on GitHub, since it
00:02:08creates a cloud session and needs to clone the repo to understand the code.
00:02:12So once that's done, it starts Claude Code in the cloud, runs the bash tool to read the
00:02:16context of the repo, and then runs a few other commands.
00:02:19And here it asks a few questions about the plan.
00:02:21And after about 2 or 3 minutes, I get a notification in the terminal telling me UltraPlan has finished
00:02:26and it's ready for review.
00:02:27So here is the plan.
00:02:28I'm actually going to zoom out a bit to make it easier to read and extend this sidebar before
00:02:33zooming in a tiny bit more.
00:02:35So first of all, it's told me the repo is empty with no commits and no code, which is not true.
00:02:40The repo is definitely not empty.
00:02:41So it's got the shape of the change, which looks good.
00:02:44It's got the build scripts and a minimal CLI that the pipeline can use for a smoke test.
00:02:49This looks very comprehensive, and the fact that it did it in about 2 to 3 minutes makes
00:02:53me think that there were some sub-agents that were being used to get it done quickly.
00:02:57But from here, I can select parts of the text and add a comment if I wanted to.
00:03:00Like over here, I can ask it, what repo are you referring to and do you have access to this?
00:03:05And from here, Claude can revise the plan.
00:03:07But before I go ahead and do that, let's take a look at my new token percentage, which has
00:03:11gone from 4% because of the debugging issue all the way to 19.
00:03:15So 15% of my tokens were used to come up with this plan.
00:03:18Which isn't too bad, I guess.
00:03:21Let's go ahead and revise this plan.
00:03:22And now it clones the correct repo.
00:03:24I don't know why it didn't do that the first time.
00:03:27So about a minute later, Claude has proposed a new plan.
00:03:30And if we open that out over here, we can see it does a much better job of understanding
00:03:35what the project contains and has created a flow diagram, has a list of the exact files
00:03:41to modify and improves the GitHub action for releases.
00:03:45But this whole process of updating the plan moved it from 19 to 37% used, meaning this
00:03:51whole plan used around 33% of my usage, which is a lot for a plan.
00:03:56Now from here, I'm going to accept the plan, which begins to execute the plan remotely.
00:04:00Now I'm sure there's a way for me to execute it in the CLI instead of executing it in the
00:04:04cloud.
00:04:05But that option wasn't really obvious.
00:04:07And after about five minutes, it's finished the implementation.
00:04:10But because there are no GitHub credentials in this environment, I have to manually create
00:04:14a new branch and create a PR, which isn't too bad.
00:04:17And I'm sure if I added to GitHub credentials, if I had a private repo, it will be able to
00:04:21pull it and add it to the sandbox for creating a plan.
00:04:25But because the scope of this demo was just to review the plan, we're going to end it
00:04:28here and not look too deep into the implementation.
00:04:32Let's now look at the same plan done with superpowers.
00:04:35Now in order to save time, I've gone ahead and executed this already inside Claude code
00:04:39so we could just run through it.
00:04:41And what I like about superpowers compared to UltraPlan is the amount of questions it
00:04:45asks.
00:04:46The UltraPlan asked three questions, but you can see here with superpowers, we get six questions,
00:04:50so double the amount.
00:04:51And I believe from this, it gives a more thorough plan.
00:04:54And because this is running locally, it doesn't have to clone my repo because it has access
00:04:58to the code directly.
00:05:00From here, it drafted out the plan and gave me the CI flow and outlines how everything
00:05:04will work.
00:05:05Now superpowers actually has two planning phases.
00:05:08The design plan that captures the problem and the requirements and the implementation plan,
00:05:13which breaks down the design into bite-sized chunks.
00:05:16So here is the final implementation plan from superpowers, which has a goal architecture
00:05:21and tech stack, which I really like.
00:05:23The file structure for the release pipeline and the list of tasks that needs to be implemented,
00:05:27including source code, which is similar to what UltraPlan provided.
00:05:31But UltraPlan didn't provide test cases, which is what superpowers does really well.
00:05:35It gets the model to write tests first, then write the implementation.
00:05:38So here we can see the test for the versioning.
00:05:42Then you run the test to see if it fails before actually implementing the version flag.
00:05:46This process happens all the way down for every single task.
00:05:50And the whole plan is about 833 lines compared to the plan from UltraPlan, which is about
00:05:55195.
00:05:56One thing to note is that the whole session for creating the superpowers design and implementation
00:06:01plan took up about 75.1K tokens.
00:06:04So that's 57 for the messaging and 1.9 for the skills, which is what superpowers mainly
00:06:10uses.
00:06:11So if you believe the pro five hour limit is about 44,000 tokens, then creating a superpowers
00:06:16plan uses much more, although I'm not convinced it's actually 44,000 tokens.
00:06:21And this is excluding prompt caching, which does a lot to reuse existing tokens.
00:06:26Now you may get the impression from that demo that I prefer using superpowers than using
00:06:30UltraPlan to plan a feature and you're not wrong there.
00:06:33But there is a time and place for UltraPlan.
00:06:35For example, if I know I'm going to be away from my machine for a long period of time,
00:06:39say I'm commuting or I'm traveling on a plane or an airport or wherever, I may want to start
00:06:44a feature on my laptop, close it, turn it off and continue it on my phone, tablet, wherever,
00:06:50and benefit from my code being in the cloud and creating PRs as long as I've installed
00:06:55the cord app on my repo, which I forgot to do for this demo.
00:06:58Whoops.
00:06:59Now, if I do choose to work locally, which I'm doing 90% of the time, then I'll probably
00:07:04use superpowers because all my code is there locally, my skills, my MCP tools, everything,
00:07:10and I can get a more thorough plan.
00:07:12Now this isn't to say a more thorough plan means a better execution.
00:07:17It's just the way I prefer working because I can have a true dialogue with the model when
00:07:21I'm planning things out.
00:07:22Now currently the UltraPlan feature is only available through the clause code CLI, so for
00:07:27the terminal and works with a pro or max subscription, since it has the code code for web link, but
00:07:32maybe in the future, they'll roll it out to different subscription plans and different
00:07:36platforms.
00:07:37So maybe you could kick off an ultra plan session from claudecode web itself.