| name | plan-with-the-corpus |
| description | Use when designing an implementation plan, scoping a slice, starting any multi-step task, or before writing significant code — and use it BEFORE the first Edit, not after. Planning is the highest-leverage review point: a bad plan line becomes hundreds of bad code lines. |
Plan with the corpus
Review leverage runs research > plan > code. Lessons that arrive while you are editing
can only save the line in front of you; lessons pulled while PLANNING save the whole
approach. So pull first, plan small, review the plan, then code.
1. Pull before you plan
py agent_cli.py boot <id> --task "<the slice>" # ranked against the task
py agent_cli.py recall "<topic keywords>" # targeted corpus search
Check for: prior attempts at this exact thing, anti-patterns on the components you'll
touch, open blockers/notes that change the premise. (Plan-time recall also arrives
automatically on your prompt when the hook is wired — treat it as a starting set,
not the whole corpus.)
2. Plan in verifiable steps
- Steps sized minutes-not-hours, each with its own check (a test, a command, a render).
- No placeholders. "TBD", "similar to step 3", "handle errors properly" are plan
failures — resolve them now, while it's cheap.
- State contraindications: what would make this plan WRONG ("don't do this if X").
- Name the verification for the whole slice up front (which suite, which dogfood command).
3. Review the plan before the code
Read the plan adversarially once: which step hides the risk? which assumption is
untested? A minute here outweighs a review cycle later. For irreversible or
outward-facing steps, confirm with the human first.
4. Execution hygiene
- Keep context lean: hand file PATHS to subagents, never paste bodies ("everything you
paste stays resident for the rest of the session").
- Fresh context per phase where natural (research → plan → implement), carrying only
the distilled artifact forward.
- When a step's assumption breaks, go back to the plan — don't improvise the
architecture mid-edit (see root-cause-before-fixes for the 3-strikes rule).
5. Close the loop
The plan's surprises are lessons: what the corpus SHOULD have told you before you started
is exactly what you record when you finish (learn with a trigger-phrased recommendation),
so the next plan starts smarter than this one did.
