Tsurai7 Plan review
Confirm the target
Name what is being reviewed (which plan, solving what problem) and the goal it
serves before critiquing. If the idea itself is unvetted, run office-hours
first — a plan review sharpens a plan; it cannot justify one.
Step 0: scope challenge (before any section review)
- Reuse first — what existing code already solves each sub-problem? Prefer capturing outputs from existing flows over building parallel ones.
- Minimum change set — flag anything deferrable without blocking the goal.
- Complexity smell — more than ~8 files touched or 2 new classes/services: stop and challenge whether fewer moving parts reach the same goal. Propose the minimal version; let the owner decide.
- Built-in over custom — for each new pattern or component, check whether the framework/runtime ships one before accepting a hand-rolled version.
- No silent drops — deferred work (distribution, ops, migrations) goes in an explicit "NOT in scope" list, not out of memory.
Once the scope decision is made, commit to it — do not re-argue scope during the section reviews below.
Section review
Work in order, at most ~8 top issues total across sections:
Architecture → Code quality → Tests → Performance.
For tests, demand a verifiable check per plan step — a plan step without its
proving command is a wish (see verification-before-completion).
Judgment instincts to apply throughout
- Blast radius — worst case, and how many systems/people it touches.
- Boring by default — innovation tokens are scarce; proven tech elsewhere.
- Incremental over big-bang — strangler fig, canary, refactor-then-change.
- Reversibility — flags and staged rollouts make being wrong cheap.
- Essential vs accidental complexity — is this solving a real problem or one the plan created?
End with a verdict: approve / reduce scope / rework, with the blocking items.
Provenance
Distilled from the gstack /plan-eng-review skill by Garry Tan
(garrytan/gstack, MIT) — method only,
none of the runtime (no brain preflight, design-doc discovery, or interactive
scaffolding carried over).