You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.
Use to implement a multi-step task sequentially in one session when subagents aren't available — plans in context, then executes
Use when the user wants to deeply research a topic OR brainstorm/explore ideas WITHOUT building anything yet — produces a cited briefing or idea-landscape (an exploration doc), never a spec, plan, or implementation. Triggers on "do deep research on X", "research X", "let's brainstorm ideas around X", "explore X", "what are some ideas for X". NOT for "build/implement/add/fix X" — that is the brainstorming skill. Set wildness with `--wild 0.1–1.0`.
Use when executing implementation plans with independent tasks in the current session
Use when starting feature work that needs isolation from current workspace or before executing implementation plans - creates isolated git worktrees with smart directory selection and safety verification
The planning rubric the execution skills run in-context at the start of a run — turns the tech spec (tech.md) when present, else the logic spec / requirements, into a task breakdown (contracts, acceptance, parallelism) before code
The rubric the execution skills run in-context — only when the work warrants it — to author the code-anchored tech spec from the approved logic spec, before planning.
Use when dispatching the pi coding agent for a sub-task — code review, analysis, edits, or multi-agent orchestration. Triggers on "use pi", "run pi", or "pi <model>" (codex, terra, opus, sonnet, gemini, haiku, grok).