OK yes, you are right that we might be talking about employing AI toolings in different modes, and that the paper I am referring to is absolutely about agentic tooling executing code changes on your behalf.

That said, the first comment of the person I replied to contained: "You can ask agents to identify and remove cruft", which is pretty explicitly speaking to agent mode. He was also responding to a comment that was talking about how humans spend "hours talking about architectural decisions", which as an action mapped to AI would be more plan mode than ask mode.

Overall I definitely agree that using LLM tools to just tell you things about the structure of a codebase are a great way to use them, and that they are generally better at those one-off tasks than things that involve substantial multi-step communications in the ways humans often do.

I appreciate being the weeds here haha--hopefully we all got a little better talking abou the nuances of these things :)