Plan Skill

/plan-skill

You are designing a skill, not writing a long prompt. The deliverable is a compact skill brief that makes the eventual implementation healthy from the start.

Write to reports/plan-skill/scan-<TS>/:

• skill-brief.md - approved scope and contract;
• adversarial-review.md - pushback and accepted/rejected objections;
• validation-plan.md - dogfood cases, commands, and review gates;
• evidence.json - manifest for scripts/evidence_gate.py.

Do not implement the skill until the brief survives adversarial pushback. If the request is just a tiny edit, say so and skip the skill machinery.

How success is judged

The frontmatter's evidence_required list IS the verdict — the run passes when evidence.json satisfies scripts/evidence_gate.py on all four items:

• skill_problem — Stage 1's one-sentence problem class, with a durable artifact named (or a recommendation against the skill).
• trigger_contract — Stage 3 frontmatter draft with best_for / not_for naming adjacent skills.
• validation_plan — validation-plan.md with at least one dogfood case and its commands.
• adversarial_review — adversarial-review.md recording Stage 2's seven attacks and the accepted/rejected objections. Write toward these gates from Stage 1.

Stage 1 - Problem Before Skill

Name the problem class in one sentence:

• What repeated failure does this skill prevent?
• Why are docs, a lint, a test, or an existing skill insufficient?
• Which job does it perform: plan, map, suspect, explain, refactor, guard, decide, triage, teach, construct, diagnose, or meta?
• What artifact will exist after the skill runs?

If no durable artifact or measurable behavior exists, recommend against creating the skill.

Stage 2 - Adversarial Requirements

Before designing the happy path, attack the idea. Record answers in adversarial-review.md.

Ask these directly:

1. What existing skill could absorb this instead?
2. What false trigger would make agents invoke it at the wrong time?
3. What work would a lazy agent skip while still sounding successful?
4. What validation proves the skill worked?
5. What should the skill explicitly refuse to do?
6. What will be stale in three months unless it is generated or tested?
7. What human judgment remains non-mechanical?

If the answers are weak, narrow the skill or stop.

Stage 3 - Contract

Draft the frontmatter before body prose:

• description with concrete triggers;
• best_for and not_for, with adjacent skills named;
• escalate_to and delegate_from where relevant;
• language / framework;
• task-packet fields (lanes, stage, consumes, produces, evidence_required, risk_triggers, max_overhead).

Then define the artifact contract:

• output directory and filenames;
• required sections;
• whether an effectiveness log entry is required;
• what downstream skill consumes the output;
• stop conditions.

Two contract rules, both learned from execution failures:

• Declared verdict. The skill body opens with a compact "How success is judged" block naming the gates the executor will face. Executors optimize toward announced verdicts; a gate revealed only at the end shapes nothing.
• Load-bearing or delete. Every mandated verification or reporting stage names its consumer (a later stage, the reply contract, or a gate). A stage whose output nothing consumes gets skipped under load at ~100% — wire it or remove it. Likewise, "read X" instructions need an un-fakeable acknowledgment (one line that cannot be written without the read), and gates must test the artifact's property, never just its existence.

Stage 4 - Implementation Shape

Pick the narrowest mechanism that works:

• prompt-only for judgment workflows;
• helper script for deterministic detection, parsing, scaffolding, or validation;
• fixtures for anything that should not regress;
• reference files only when they prevent SKILL.md from getting bulky.

Use progressive disclosure. If SKILL.md approaches 500 lines, split rarely-read detail into one-level references.

Contracts must be executable as written, on hosts the skill was not written on:

• a sub-agent dispatch names an agent type that can actually produce the demanded outputs (a read-only type cannot satisfy a write-three-files contract), and its allowed-tool list includes what the outputs require;
• template placeholders state their fallbacks (detached HEAD, no venv, no branch);
• "always in scope" convention sources state an absence fallback — host-adapter slots must cover total absence, not just substitution, and worked examples naming origin-project helpers are marked as illustration so they cannot be harvested as false rules.

Stage 5 - Dogfood Plan

Every new skill needs at least one dogfood case before it is considered healthy:

• one realistic prompt that should invoke it;
• one nearby prompt it must reject or route elsewhere;
• one fixture/report/check that proves the artifact shape;
• one matcher expectation if trigger routing matters;
• one adversarial review pass after the first implementation.

Prefer real host-project tasks over invented examples. If a real task is too expensive, write a small fixture and state the gap.

For execution-heavy skills, the binding dogfood is a real-host run: execute the skill against a codebase it was not written on, under hostile-but-realistic conditions (missing convention docs, no venv, detached HEAD, commits forbidden). Scenario probes and document review both miss the unexecutable-against-reality defect class by construction. The dogfood log — each friction citing the text it was following, each fix, and the scenario that should now pass — is the skill's replay case; keep it.

Stage 6 - Build Gate

After implementation, run the smallest meaningful gate set:

.venv/bin/python scripts/skill_meta.py lint --quiet
.venv/bin/python .claude/skills/which-skill/scripts/match.py "<positive prompt>" --json
.venv/bin/python .claude/skills/which-skill/scripts/match.py "<negative prompt>" --json

If the skill declares evidence_required, also run scripts/evidence_gate.py against a dogfood report directory. If the skill has scripts, add or update touched tests and run them.

For a material revision of an existing skill, the gate set is the repair loop (see /repair-skill): frame review against the rubric, a scout that verifies the review's claims before any edit, an independent non-context-sharing verifier after, and an A/B probe at the headline defect site at the weakest supported model tier. When judging probes, score the grounding, not just the behavior — an executor can produce the right behavior while citing mandates that do not exist, which inflates the old-condition score and hides brittleness.

Evidence Manifest

{
  "skill": "plan-skill",
  "scan_id": "scan-<TS>",
  "evidence": {
    "skill_problem": "skill-brief.md",
    "trigger_contract": "skill-brief.md",
    "validation_plan": "validation-plan.md",
    "adversarial_review": "adversarial-review.md"
  }
}

Then run:

.venv/bin/python scripts/evidence_gate.py check --skill plan-skill --scan-dir reports/plan-skill/scan-<TS>