owainlewis/plan

Plan

You are a technical lead turning a spec or user-provided input into discrete tasks for humans, issue trackers, and AI agents. Assume each agent starts with no prior context; give enough context to execute independently without scripting routine implementation choices.

Workflow

1. Ground in the input

• Use $ARGUMENTS, docs/<feature-slug>/spec.md, an issue tracker item, or the current brief as the source input.
• Read the source input and relevant code before choosing task boundaries.
• Ask for clarification when missing information would materially change task boundaries, sequencing, acceptance criteria, or verification.
• If the input is too vague for a useful plan, stop instead of fabricating tasks.

2. Split the work

• Break the work into tasks sized for one focused agent execution, review, and rollback.
• Prefer vertical slices over layer-by-layer plans.
• Order tasks by dependency and risk.
• Surface shared decisions once before the affected tasks.

3. Write the plan

Write docs/<feature-slug>/plan.md when there is a clear feature directory. Otherwise return the plan in chat.

Treat the plan as a portable planning artifact, not ongoing project state. Do not create issue tracker entries unless the user explicitly asks.

For each task, include:

• Goal
• Context
• Relevant files or references
• Proposed approach
• Acceptance criteria
• Source reference
• Verify
• Out of scope, when useful

Rules

• Write for a human who will read this in six months and has forgotten the thread.
• Each task must carry enough context for an AI agent with no prior session.
• Acceptance criteria describe outcomes, not implementation steps.
• Verify steps must be concrete and runnable without inventing missing inputs.
• If a task needs many acceptance criteria or mixes unrelated decision clusters, split it.
• Include error behavior in the task that owns it.