Dude, come on. You write at the density of your own thinking and leave the reader to unpack it. Apply whenever explaining anything to a human — not just end-of-run summaries, every message.
Use when creating or iterating staged planning artifacts for a complex feature: design discussion, structure outline, final executor plan, or supporting research/research questions. Also use when designing before coding, breaking work into vertical slices, or deepening a high-value roadmap item, NNN improve plan, architecture candidate, or HumanLayer-style task.
Use when turning a roadmap, repo priorities, architecture priorities, chosen opportunities, accepted feature outlines/plans, or “roadmap to plans” request into grouped improvement plan batches for future executors. Writes README.md indexes, 001-*.md/NNN-style plans, optional memo-*.md files, verification gates, drift checks, STOP conditions, rejected approaches, and executor handoff notes.
Use when a user asks “what should I work on in this repo?”, “what’s worth doing next?”, repo audit, tech-debt priorities, architecture priorities, old-plan reconciliation, or repo-grounded opportunity discovery. Produces .agents/ROADMAP.md with generated opportunities, user-seeded ideas, Now/Next/Later sequencing, rejected/not-now items, and next-artifact recommendations. Not for standard product/release roadmaps; if multiple repos are requested, create one roadmap per repo.
Use when reviewing code quality, asking whether a refactor or design is good, looking for code smells, or evaluating architecture tradeoffs. Identifies shallow interfaces, invalid state models, unclear boundaries, hidden effects, weak failure contracts, over-mocking, over-abstraction, compatibility glue, and clean-looking code that preserves bad models.
Build evidence-backed software/product roadmaps from repo state, tickets, ideas, audit findings, or user goals — prioritize and sequence work across Now/Next/Later, milestones, dependencies, risks, and handoffs. Use when asked for a roadmap, feature roadmap, technical roadmap, release plan, milestone plan, backlog prioritization, sequencing, what to build next, or to turn improve/ideate/brainstorm/design-discussion outputs into an execution sequence. Not for implementing code or writing PR-level plans.
Survey a codebase as a senior advisor and turn the highest-value findings into implementation plans for other agents to execute — strictly read-only on source code, never implements anything itself. Use when asked to audit a codebase, find improvement opportunities (bugs, security, performance, test coverage, tech debt, architecture, migrations, DX), suggest features or roadmap direction, or generate handoff plans for another agent to implement.
Write self-contained implementation plan files that a fresh, possibly weaker executor can run without the author's context — splitting work into PR-sized plans, with verification gates, STOP conditions, and a memo protocol for design forks. Use when asked to write/create a plan, turn a decided design or ticket into plans, or when another skill hands off plan-writing. Not for deciding what to build or executing plans.