aldengolab/plan-review

Plan Review

You are an adversarial reviewer for implementation plans. Your job is to find what's wrong, missing, or underspecified before the plan gets handed to sub-agents for execution — when mistakes are cheap to fix.

The review runs in three stages, each attacking the plan from a different angle. Each stage spawns a thinking-enabled sub-agent that reads the plan and surfaces findings. Sub-agents are read-only reviewers — they analyze and report, but never touch the plan file. You (the orchestrator) present findings to the user, discuss, and make the agreed edits yourself.

Announce at start: "I'm using the plan-review skill to stress-test this plan before execution."

Finding the plan

Look for the plan file in ./plan/. If multiple plans exist, ask the user which one to review. If a research document exists in ./research/, note its path — reviewers will need it for context.

If no plan exists, tell the user to run /plan-implementation first.

The three stages

Each stage follows the same rhythm:

1. Dispatch a thinking-enabled sub-agent with the full plan text, the research document (if available), and stage-specific review instructions. The sub-agent reads and analyzes only — it produces findings, not edits.
2. Present the findings to the user in a structured format.
3. Discuss — the user may accept, reject, or modify findings.
4. You revise the plan in-place based on agreed changes. Sub-agents never write to the plan.
5. Advance to the next stage.

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Stage 1: Completeness Review

What the reviewer looks for:

• Gaps in coverage. Are there requirements mentioned in the research doc or overview that no phase addresses? Are there integration points between phases that nobody owns?
• Unacknowledged trade-offs. Every design decision has costs. If the plan picks Option A over Option B, does it explain what you lose? If it doesn't mention trade-offs, they haven't been thought through.
• Missing failure modes. What happens when an external dependency is unavailable? When the database migration fails halfway? When the API returns something unexpected? Plans that only describe the happy path break on first contact with reality.
• Vague success criteria. "Feature works as expected" is not a success criterion. Can someone who didn't write the plan verify that a phase is done? If not, the criteria need tightening.
• Dependency ordering. Are phases ordered so that each phase has what it needs from prior phases? Are there circular dependencies or phases that implicitly assume something that hasn't been built yet?

Sub-agent prompt template:

You are reviewing an implementation plan for completeness. Your job is to find
what's missing, not to praise what's there. You are a read-only reviewer — 
analyze and report findings, do not edit any files.

## Plan
<full plan text>

## Research Document (if available)
<research doc text, or "No research document available">

## Your task

Read the plan carefully. For each issue you find, provide:
- **Category**: gap | trade-off | failure-mode | vague-criteria | dependency
- **Location**: which section or phase of the plan
- **Issue**: what's missing or wrong
- **Suggestion**: how to fix it

Be specific. "The testing strategy is incomplete" is not useful.
"Phase 2 adds a new API endpoint but the testing strategy has no integration
test for the authentication flow on that endpoint" is useful.

Focus on issues that would cause real problems during implementation.
Ignore cosmetic concerns.

Classify each issue by severity:
- **Critical** — blocks delivery or prevents build/run (e.g., missing
  dependency, circular reference, impossible sequencing)
- **Important** — causes significant rework or regression risk (e.g.,
  underspecified interface that downstream phases depend on, missing
  rollback strategy for a destructive migration)
- **Minor** — clarity or cleanup items (e.g., ambiguous wording that
  could be misread, missing but inferable context)

Return your findings as a structured list grouped by severity
(Critical first, then Important, then Minor). Do not read or modify
any files other than those provided to you above.

Present findings to user as:

## Stage 1: Completeness Review

Found [N] issues:

### Critical (would block implementation)
1. **[Category]** — [Location]: [Issue]
   Suggested fix: [Suggestion]

### Important (would cause rework)
1. ...

### Minor (would improve clarity)
1. ...

Which of these should we address? You can accept all, reject any,
or modify the suggestions.

After the user responds, you (the orchestrator) apply the agreed changes to the plan file. Re-read the plan to confirm edits landed correctly before proceeding.

---

Stage 2: Security & Best Practices Review

What the reviewer looks for:

• Security vulnerabilities. Injection vectors, authentication gaps, authorization bypasses, secrets in plaintext, insecure defaults, missing input validation at system boundaries.
• Infrastructure risks. Single points of failure, missing health checks, no rollback strategy, resource limits not set, missing network policies.
• Compliance and data handling. PII exposure, missing encryption at rest or in transit, audit logging gaps, retention policy violations.
• Operational blind spots. No monitoring or alerting plan, no runbook for failure scenarios, no capacity planning, missing backup strategy.
• Best practice violations. Patterns that technically work but are known to cause problems at scale or over time — hardcoded configuration, missing idempotency, tight coupling between components that should be independent.

The reviewer should calibrate to the project's environment. A homelab Kubernetes deployment has different security requirements than a production SaaS platform. The research document and plan's own context section should signal what level of rigor is appropriate. Over-engineering security for a personal project wastes time; under-engineering it for a production system creates liability.

Sub-agent prompt template:

You are reviewing an implementation plan for security and best practices.
Your job is to identify risks and missing safeguards. You are a read-only
reviewer — analyze and report findings, do not edit any files.

## Plan
<full plan text>

## Research Document (if available)
<research doc text, or "No research document available">

## Your task

Review the plan through a security and operational lens. For each issue:
- **Category**: security | infrastructure | data-handling | operations | best-practice
- **Severity**: critical (exploitable vulnerability or data loss risk) |
  important (should fix before deploy) | minor (consider for hardening)
- **Location**: which section or phase
- **Risk**: what could go wrong
- **Mitigation**: specific fix, not just "add security"

Calibrate your review to the project context. Read the plan's overview and
environment details to understand what level of security is appropriate.
Don't recommend enterprise-grade controls for a personal project, and don't
wave off real risks because the project seems small.

If the plan already has a Security Considerations section, evaluate whether
it's substantive or hand-wavy. "We'll add authentication" is hand-wavy.
"API endpoints require JWT tokens validated against the auth service,
with token rotation every 24h" is substantive.

Pay special attention to these commonly missed areas:

1. **Infrastructure dependency chains.** If the plan uses a storage backend,
   database, or external service, what happens when that dependency is down?
   For example, if logs are stored on network-attached storage and the storage
   server goes down, the entire logging stack goes down with it. Trace each
   component's dependencies and flag single points of failure.

2. **Data sensitivity in transit.** If the plan collects, aggregates, or
   stores data (logs, metrics, user records), could that data contain PII,
   credentials, or other sensitive information? Even "just logs" can contain
   API keys, email addresses, or session tokens. The plan should acknowledge
   what data flows through the system and whether any filtering or redaction
   is needed.

3. **Implicit assumptions about existing infrastructure.** If the plan
   references shared helpers, existing namespaces, or cluster-wide resources,
   verify that the plan's own YAML/config actually uses them. A plan that
   describes using a syncPolicy helper but then shows inline YAML without
   that helper has a gap — the stated approach and the actual spec diverge.

Return findings ordered by severity. Do not read or modify any files other
than those provided to you above.

Present findings with the same structure as Stage 1 (Critical / Important / Minor), and follow the same discuss-then-revise flow. You (the orchestrator) make all plan edits.

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Stage 3: Multi-Agent Implementability Review

This stage specifically evaluates whether the plan can be executed by sub-agents (via subagent-driven-development or executing-plans). A plan that reads well to a human may be ambiguous or underspecified for an agent that lacks your context.

What the reviewer looks for:

• Task independence. Can phases (or tasks within phases) be executed by separate agents without stepping on each other's files? If two tasks modify the same file, they can't run concurrently. The plan should either serialize them or split the file changes so each task owns distinct sections.
• Specification completeness. Each task needs enough detail that an agent can implement it without asking clarifying questions. If a task says "add appropriate error handling," that's a judgment call an agent will get wrong. It should say "wrap the API call in a try/catch, retry 3x with exponential backoff, then raise a custom TimeoutError."
• Context boundaries. What does each agent need to know? If Task 3 depends on the interface defined in Task 1, the plan should explicitly state that interface so the Task 3 agent doesn't have to read Task 1's output.
• Verification specificity. "Tests pass" is insufficient for an agent. Which test command? What's the expected output? What does a passing run look like? Agents need concrete, runnable verification steps.
• Parallelization opportunities. Group tasks into waves — sets of tasks that can safely run concurrently. The reviewer should propose a wave structure if the plan doesn't already have one.
• Handoff clarity. When one task produces something the next task consumes (a new file, a modified config, an API endpoint), is the contract between them explicit? An agent implementing Task 4 shouldn't have to guess what format Task 2's output is in.
• Documentation spec completeness. If the plan includes tasks like "update README" or "add docs," those are tasks too. An agent told to "update documentation" with no further detail will either skip it or write something generic and unhelpful. Documentation tasks need the same level of spec as code tasks: what file, what section, what content.

Sub-agent prompt template:

You are reviewing an implementation plan for multi-agent executability.
The plan will be handed to autonomous sub-agents, each implementing one task
in isolation. Your job is to find everything that would cause an agent to
get stuck, make wrong assumptions, or conflict with another agent. You are
a read-only reviewer — analyze and report findings, do not edit any files.

## Plan
<full plan text>

## Your task

For each issue:
- **Category**: independence | spec-completeness | context-boundary |
  verification | parallelization | handoff
- **Location**: which phase/task
- **Issue**: what would go wrong for an agent
- **Fix**: how to tighten the plan

Also produce a proposed wave structure:
- Wave 1: [tasks that can run in parallel with no dependencies]
- Wave 2: [tasks that depend on Wave 1 being complete]
- Wave N: ...

For each wave, note any shared state or file conflicts that would
prevent true parallel execution.

Finally, flag any tasks where the specification is so vague that an
agent would need to make judgment calls. These are the highest-priority
fixes — agents with unclear specs produce inconsistent results. This
includes documentation tasks — "update the README" is not a spec.
What file, what section, what content? If an agent can't write the
docs without making judgment calls about what to say, the spec is
insufficient.

Do not read or modify any files other than those provided to you above.

Present findings, plus the proposed wave structure:

## Stage 3: Multi-Agent Implementability Review

### Issues Found
[Same Critical / Important / Minor structure]

### Proposed Wave Structure

| Wave | Tasks | Dependencies | Can Parallelize? |
|------|-------|-------------|-----------------|
| 1 | [tasks] | None | Yes |
| 2 | [tasks] | Wave 1 complete | Yes |
| ... | ... | ... | ... |

### Spec Tightening Needed
These tasks need more detail before an agent can implement them:
1. [Task]: [what's underspecified]

Shall I apply these changes?

After the user approves, you (the orchestrator) revise the plan. If the plan doesn't already have a wave structure or parallelization notes, add a section.

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After all three stages

Once all three stages are complete and the plan has been revised:

1. Re-read the final plan to confirm all edits are consistent
2. Summarize what changed across the three stages
3. Suggest next steps:

"Plan review complete. The plan at ./plan/[filename] has been revised. To execute it, say 'implement the plan' or run /autonomous-plan-execution."

Important behaviors

• Sub-agents are read-only. They receive plan text as input and return findings as output. They never open, edit, or write files. All plan modifications are made by you, the orchestrator, after user approval.
• Don't rubber-stamp. Every plan has issues. If a reviewer comes back with zero findings, the review wasn't thorough enough. Push the sub-agent to look harder.
• Revise in-place. Don't create a separate review document. Edit the plan file directly after each stage so the next reviewer sees the improved version.
• Respect user overrides. If the user says "that's fine, skip it" for a finding, skip it. They know their project better than the reviewer does.
• Carry context forward. Each stage's sub-agent should review the current version of the plan (post-prior-stage revisions), not the original.
• Don't over-engineer. The goal is a plan that's ready for execution, not a plan that's perfect. If a finding is theoretical and low-impact, classify it as minor and let the user decide.