Honorboxx crew-scope: size first, then plan that much
The expensive failure isn't messy code; it's building the wrong thing well. The cheap insurance is proportional: most tasks deserve five lines of plan, a few deserve none, and a few deserve a real one. Oversized planning is its own failure (planning theater); this skill picks the size.
The sizing test
Count the plausible designs, not the lines of code:
- S: one obvious way to do it, blast radius one or two files. Just do it. (A one-line fix in a payment path is NOT S: blast radius outranks size.)
- M: one approach, several files; or any task where you paused to think "hmm, where should this live?". Write the 5-line mini-plan below, in the conversation, before code.
- L: two or more genuinely different approaches exist, or the done
condition is fuzzy, or it touches schema/public API/money. Dispatch
crew-planner(or write a real plan yourself if dispatching is unavailable) and get the options question settled before any code.
A second test, for the done condition: if you can't state in one sentence how you'll know the task is finished, it isn't scoped yet. Keep asking "how will we know?" until that sentence exists. That sentence later becomes the verification target, so writing it now is not overhead, it's prepayment.
The 5-line mini-plan (M tasks)
Goal: <the one-sentence done condition>
Touches: <files/modules you expect to change>
Approach: <one sentence, enough for someone to object to>
Risk: <the thing most likely to bite, and how you'll notice early>
Non-goal: <the adjacent thing you are deliberately NOT doing>
Thirty seconds to write. Its value is that every line is objection-bait: a
wrong Touches: line gets corrected now instead of at review.
Scope creep: the mid-task rule
"While I'm here" is how an M task becomes an L task nobody approved. When you notice adjacent work (a refactor begging to happen, a second bug, a missing test elsewhere): park it in a follow-ups list and finish the scoped task. The parked list at the end is a feature of your report, not an admission of laziness. Exception: adjacent work that blocks correct completion of the current task isn't creep. It's discovered scope; resize honestly (M→L) and say so before continuing.
Failure modes
| Smell | Correction |
|---|---|
| Mini-plan for renaming a variable | That's planning theater; S tasks skip straight to work |
| "I'll figure out the design as I code" on an L | The design decisions still get made, just silently and worse |
| Questions to the user the codebase can answer | Recon first; ask only what grep cannot resolve |
| Done condition = "improve X" | Not a done condition; find the observable |
| Third "while I'm here" this task | Stop; resize or park |