Anthropic has integrated a new feature called "Ultraplan" into Claude Code, which shifts the planning phase of programming tasks to the cloud. This enables developers to initiate a planning job from their terminal, while Claude processes and generates the plan on the Claude Code web interface, leaving the terminal free for other development work.
Documentation on code.claude.com highlights three key distinctions of Ultraplan compared to local planning. Users can now leave comments on specific sections of a plan, rather than having to respond to the entire document at once. The planning process itself runs in the background within the cloud. Furthermore, the finalized plan can be executed either directly within the browser or back in the developer's terminal. The browser interface also offers enhanced collaboration tools, including inline comments, emoji reactions, and direct revision requests.
To utilize Ultraplan, users require a Claude Code web account, a GitHub repository, and Claude Code version 2.1.91 or newer. It's important to note that Ultraplan does not support integration with Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, or Microsoft Foundry. Anthropic employee Thariq mentioned on X that the feature consumes roughly the same number of tokens as the previous local planning mode. Currently, Ultraplan is available as a preview for all users who have activated Claude Code on the web.