Anthropic just rolled out a feature that rebuilds Claude Code’s plan mode from the ground up: Ultraplan moves the entire planning phase into a cloud session while your local terminal stays usable. You kick it off with the new /ultraplan slash command — and anyone who’s ever been stuck watching a 20-minute plan chew up their shell knows immediately why this matters.
What Ultraplan does
Instead of running plan mode locally, Claude Code hands the planning task off to a dedicated cloud session in Anthropic’s Cloud Container Runtime (CCR). There, Opus 4.6 works on the plan with up to 30 minutes of reserved compute time — with access to your repository via a cloud-synced snapshot. Your local terminal polls for status every three seconds and otherwise stays completely free. You can keep typing, debugging, spinning up new branches while the deep plan is being drafted in the background.
Anthropic says cloud planning sessions run about twice as fast as local plan mode. On top of that you get features that simply weren’t possible in the terminal: inline comments on individual plan steps, ASCII and Mermaid diagrams embedded in the plan, and the ability to manage multiple plans in parallel.
Plan in the cloud, execute wherever you want
The real trick is the handoff: once the plan is ready, you can either execute it directly in the cloud — or ‘teleport’ it back into your local terminal and step through it there. That enables a workflow that used to be painful: kick off planning for a big refactor, keep working on smaller tasks in parallel, then review and execute the finished plan locally at your own pace.
If you’ve been using Claude Code as a CLI assistant only, this release makes Anthropic’s direction very clear: Claude Code as a distributed system where local and cloud sessions blend seamlessly. It’s consistent with the pattern of the last few months — first Claude Code on the web, then Dispatch for phone-based task delegation, now Ultraplan for cloud planning.
Requirements and caveats
Ultraplan is currently a research preview and needs an active Claude Code account (Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise). You also need a GitHub repository connected to Claude Code on the web — no repo connection, no cloud snapshot, no Ultraplan. Isolated local projects without a remote stay on the classic plan mode.
The 30-minute cap per session is generous but may not quite cover the biggest architecture plans. And as with any research preview, feedback is explicitly welcome and behaviour can change at any time.
Takeaway
Ultraplan is another step away from the ‘Claude is a chat in your terminal’ mental model and toward a proper distributed developer setup. If you spend a lot of time in /plan, you’ll feel the difference immediately — no more dead waiting while you stare at a plan being generated. And if you’ve been skeptical about whether cloud sessions make sense inside a local dev workflow, Ultraplan gives you a very concrete reason to change your mind.
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