Ultraplan and ultrareview: plan hard before Claude writes code, then review the diff cold

The two highest-leverage habits in a single Claude Code session: make it interview you and plan the whole change in writing before it touches a file, then make it tear the diff apart, cold, before anything gets committed. Both are free, and they cover each other's blind spots. Episode page & show notes Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code The last big habit of driving one Claude Code session by hand well: front-load the thinking, then back-load the review. Two workflows, not commands, built from primitives you already have. Ultraplan. Plan mode as the substrate (shift-tab into the read-only state, the approval gate you can edit and send back), then the moves that turn it into a workflow: let Claude interview you to lock requirements before it guesses, write the plan to a file so it survives a context reset, and have it critique its own riskiest assumptions before you approve. Spend a large thinking budget where being wrong is costly, skip the ceremony on trivial changes, and remember thinking tokens bill as output (callback to the cost episode). Codify the ritual as a custom slash command with read-only allowed-tools. Sources: Claude Code common workflows, best practices, slash commands, and managing cost. Ultrareview. Review the diff, not your memory of watching it happen: git diff against main, automated gates first (typecheck, lint, tests, build), then human-and-model judgment on the logic and security bugs no check sees, the untenanted query and the secret in a log line. Use the built-in /security-review and the claude-code-security-review action (mind the prompt-injection caveat on fork PRs). Wire the mechanical floor into hooks so a failing typecheck can't be committed, and write the "before every commit" list into your CLAUDE.md. The pitfall: review theater. A session that wrote the code rubber-stamps its own work with vague praise and zero findings. Recognize it by the absence of specifics; fix it by reviewing the diff cold, in a cleared context or a subagent that never saw the code written, and by forcing a why-is-this-correct justification per change. That cold-diff reviewer is the doorway to the next episode's review-and-fix loop. News. Opus 4.8 fast mode reportedly got around 2.5x faster at roughly a third the old price (announcement); Claude Code 2.1.161 (June 2) now carries OpenTelemetry resource attributes through as labels and adds a done/total counter to the agents view (changelog); and a Strava MCP connector lands as the connector list keeps filling in. Earlier episodes referenced: permissions and plan mode, custom slash commands and hooks, skills, subagents, MCP servers, context windows and CLAUDE.md, cost and rate-limit engineering, and parallel sessions with git worktrees.