compound-v-plan

name	compound-v-plan
description	Autonomous planning with internal reasoning. Researches, evaluates ideas, presents a plan. Minimizes user round-trips. Use before making non-trivial changes.

Planning Skill

Announce at start: "I'm using the planning skill to work through this."

When to use this skill

• any multi-file change
• any change that impacts behavior, data, auth, billing, or production workflows
• any debugging that needs systematic isolation
• any design decision with multiple viable approaches

Core pattern: think first, ask smart

Planning is LLM-driven, not turn-by-turn. Follow these phases:

Phase 1: Establish the goal

Determine the desired end result — the single sentence that defines success.

• If the user stated a clear goal, use it.
• If the goal is ambiguous, ask ONE question: "What's the desired end result?" and STOP.
• Do NOT ask multiple clarifying questions. Infer what you can and note assumptions.

Phase 2: Research (autonomous — no user interaction)

Do all of this in parallel (multiple search_web + view_file calls with waitForPreviousTools: false):

• search_web for best practices, alternatives, and pitfalls. Scope to versions in stack.md.
• view_file_outline on relevant project files.
• Read .promptherder/future-tasks.md if it exists — check if any deferred ideas are relevant.
• Read .agent/rules/stack.md and .agent/rules/structure.md if they exist.
• Read .promptherder/hard-rules.md if it exists — all rules must be respected.