planning

name	planning
description	Produce deterministic execution plans with story artifacts ready for workflow-driven delivery. Use when tasks are multi-step, high-risk, ambiguous, or span multiple files/services.

Planning

Use this skill to produce execution-ready plans before implementation.

Planning Loop

1. Explore relevant codepaths, docs, and constraints first.
2. Enumerate ambiguous branches and unknowns explicitly.
3. Interview the plan across the full design tree:
   • Challenge assumptions directly, surface blind spots/edge cases/sequencing risks, and avoid passive transcription.
   • Ask one question at a time and wait for feedback before continuing; only batch questions when they are fully independent, and limit each batch to at most three questions.
   • Resolve decision dependencies one-by-one; do not advance while upstream decisions remain open.
   • If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, investigate first and only ask when uncertainty remains.
   • For each question you ask me, provide a recommended answer first.
   • Base recommendations on concrete codebase/docs evidence when available; when evidence is unavailable, state the assumption explicitly before requesting confirmation or correction.
4. Continue until all implementation-critical decisions are resolved (decisions that materially change execution steps, ordering, or scope), no unresolved upstream dependencies remain, and no open questions remain for final plan output.
5. Once all open questions are resolved and before presenting final plan output, apply the canonical critique gate defined in AGENTS.md.

Execution Readiness and Guardrails

• Do not start execution with unresolved decision branches.
• Do not leave implementation-critical steps as TBD or "decide later."
• Ensure execution steps are ordered, concrete, and testable.
• Ensure rollback/mitigation approach is clear before execution.

Plan Output Requirements

When producing or validating a plan, include only actionable execution instructions:

1. Objective
2. Deterministic story plan artifact:
   • Format implementation work as story blocks that execution agents can follow without reinterpretation.
   • Each story block must include: stable story key, dependencies, numbered implementation steps, acceptance checks, and rollback/mitigation notes.
   • Keep story keys machine-parseable and execution order topologically valid.
3. Execution handoff constraints:
   • Declare sequencing constraints and concurrency boundaries required by execution workflow.
   • Identify vertical integration checkpoints that execution must preserve as feedback anchors.
   • Include the exact persisted plan artifact path in the handoff and require execution to consume that exact path (no default-path inference).
4. Verification/acceptance checks

All open questions must be resolved during the planning conversation before presenting final plan output. Do not include meta-commentary, decision-making history, tradeoff history, or rationale narrative in final plan output.

Execution Handoff

Once the final plan artifact is accepted, load the execution-workflow skill to drive story delivery. Persist the accepted plan artifact using the canonical location and naming conventions defined by the agentic-projects skill before handoff, and include that exact plan path as an explicit handoff field for execution.