The four modes, deeply
A mode is not a personality or a difficulty setting — it is the permission your message carries. Before the agent reads your words, the mode has already decided what your message is allowed to cause: an answer, a plan, a change, or a look at an image. Get the mode right and even a weak brief lands; get it wrong and even a great brief misses.
Sonderr has four task modes: Ask, Plan, Build and Vision. The mode is the first thing the agent reads — before your words, before your attached files — because it answers the only question that matters for safety: what is this message allowed to cause? Mode and access are separate controls. A mode says what kind of turn this is; access controls say what the turn may touch. That separation is why an Ask turn cannot edit a file and a Plan turn cannot spend anything.
1 · Ask — understand before anything moves
Ask is read-only intelligence: explain, analyze, compare, summarize, translate, review. The agent reads what you give it — files, pasted text, an upload — and answers. Nothing on your machine changes, nothing is written, nothing is spent beyond the tokens of the answer itself. Ask is the right mode for the questions people are embarrassed to ask agents: what does this script actually do?, summarize this contract clause in plain words, why did my build fail, judging by this log? If you are even slightly unsure what you want done, start in Ask. A precise Ask answer is the cheapest possible way to discover what you actually need.
2 · Plan — shape the work, touch nothing
Plan takes a goal and returns shaped work: steps, order, open questions, risks — with no changes made anywhere. It exists because the most expensive mistake with an agent is letting it start building before the work is shaped. A Plan turn should end with something you could hand to a colleague: an outline, a task list, a set of acceptance checks. If the plan is wrong, you lost one turn; if the build was wrong, you lost the build. That asymmetry is the whole argument for planning. See Prompting & task briefs for the four-part brief pattern that feeds a good Plan turn.
3 · Build — make the change, leave evidence
Build is the only mode that modifies anything — files, configs, project trees. With the right to change comes the duty to prove: substantial Build work writes a checkpoint (goal, milestone, verified evidence, decisions, one exact next action), so the work survives interruptions and can be audited after the fact. Build respects every access gate in front of it — sandboxing, task-mode gates on mutations, present-turn authorization for anything that mutates outside the workspace. For what those gates physically are, read Security, updates & privacy.
4 · Vision — when pixels are the input
Vision mode is image understanding plus image generation and editing through the edit_image tool: OCR on screenshots, charts read into data, error dialogs understood, images created or edited to spec. You do not switch to Vision by hand when attaching images — attaching an image switches it on automatically. Vision is still Ask-class for your files: understanding an image does not grant any write access. The full pipeline, including the three permission gates around image endpoints, lives in Image generation & Vision mode.
5 · Choosing in one look
| You want to… | Mode | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Understand a file, log or error | Ask | Read-only; the cheapest turn that produces knowledge. |
| Get a shape for work you haven't started | Plan | Produces steps and checks; changes nothing. |
| Actually change or produce something | Build | Writes checkpoints; respects every access gate. |
| Read or make images | Vision | Understanding plus edit_image; still no write access. |
6 · The mistakes that waste turns
- Building unshaped. A vague Build brief produces vague artifacts. The agent will run out of context before it runs out of ways to guess wrong. Plan first; it costs one turn.
- Staying in Ask forever. The opposite failure: treating the agent as a chatbot and re-asking for changes by hand. When the plan is right, switch to Build and let it work.
- Mode as mood. Switching to Build "to make it faster" does not make anything faster — it just removes the permission question from view. Speed comes from the brief, not the mode.
- Forgetting attachments flip Vision. An image attached to a Build brief makes the turn Vision-class for understanding; the build intent still needs Build. Say both parts: what to look at, what to do.
Modes are the grammar of the workspace; the sentences you write inside them are briefs. The next step is Prompting & task briefs — the four-part pattern that turns a mode into a result. For where the results land, see Artifacts, files & deliverables.