spine-plan-seed

name	spine-plan-seed
description	Use for long-running, complex, or exploratory repository work that benefits from a lightweight durable task tree under ./.codex/spineplan/.

Spine Plan Seed

Use this skill for long-running, complex, or exploratory work where the problem, solution, or execution path is not fully known in advance. Do not use it for trivial questions or small one-step edits.

Task tree

Create the task tree under the current repository:

./.codex/spineplan/{task_name}_{YYYYMMDD_HHmm}/

The root contains tree.yml, nodes/, evidence/, and artifacts/. Each node is a node.md; child directories represent recursive decomposition. tree.yml is the authority for the active node and node statuses. The recursive node.md files hold node-local details; do not duplicate those details in the index.

Node state

Keep each node focused on one verifiable goal. tree.yml records each node path with status pending, in_progress, blocked, or done. A node.md records parent, Goal, Next, and Evidence.

Mark a node done only after its goal is satisfied and relevant evidence is recorded. Mark it blocked with the reason in the node when work cannot continue. Keep at most one in_progress node, and make active point to it. Creating a child registers it as pending and does not change the active node.

Maintenance

The agent explicitly maintains tree.yml and the node files as ordinary repository files. Update them before pausing, handing off, compacting, or completing work. Use the bundled scripts to create and mechanically validate trees; the scripts do not infer, repair, or decide task meaning or completion.

Spine tree is naturally both a living-context management tree and a task-context tree. Use it together with this durable plan tree rather than treating them as separate competing plans: a Spine node may advance one plan node, several Spine nodes may advance the same plan node, and temporary Spine nodes may have no plan-node counterpart. Keep durable status and evidence in the plan files; preserve the current plan-node path and only the minimum continuation context in Spine memory. Before a Spine transition that changes engineering scope, or before compaction, handoff, or pause, update the corresponding plan node.

To resume, read tree.yml, then read the node named by active, and run check_plan.py before continuing. Update tree.yml explicitly when the engineering scope or a node status changes.

Scripts

Run the bundled scripts from the installed skill directory supplied by Codex:

python scripts/init_plan.py <task-name>
python scripts/add_node.py <task-root> <parent-node> <node-name>
python scripts/check_plan.py <task-root>

See references/schema.md for the minimal file format.