CCAR-F objective 3.4 · Domain 3 · 20% of the exam

Plan Mode vs Direct Execution

The deciding line is short enough to memorise: if you could describe the diff in one sentence, skip the plan. Plan when the approach is uncertain, when several files change, or when the code is unfamiliar to you. The honest concession is that planning adds overhead, which is what stops the plan-everything answer being merely stupid. Two distinctions get examined. Plan mode addresses unknown scope, while effort addresses reasoning depth inside a single response, and they solve different problems. And plan mode is an approval gate, so an unattended pipeline with nobody to approve wants scoped permissions instead.