Plan Rerun State Revalidation

Plan Rerun State Revalidation

Use when resuming a plan-hardening loop from a handoff, or before launching a fresh adversarial rerun after prior review waves.

Why this exists

Handoffs and stale plan summaries can be directionally right but factually outdated on critical governance points:

• a local .planning/plan-approved/<issue>.md marker may now exist
• the GitHub issue may still carry status:plan-approved
• docs/plans/README.md may still say draft
• newer scripts/review/results/*plan-<issue>* artifacts may exist, including self-review or superseding same-day artifacts

If you copy stale assumptions into a new review prompt, reviewers will correctly flag the prompt/plan narrative itself as wrong.

Mandatory recheck set

Before trusting the handoff or writing a rerun prompt, re-verify all of these directly:

1. Live GitHub issue labels/state
   • gh issue view <issue> --json labels,state,...
2. Local approval marker
   • .planning/plan-approved/<issue>.md
3. Local plan index row
   • docs/plans/README.md
4. All existing review artifacts
   • scripts/review/results/*plan-<issue>*
5. Current plan header and ## Adversarial Review Summary
6. Raw provider logs if the artifact history looks inconsistent
   • .planning/quick/review-<issue>-*.out

Interpretation rules

• Do not say "no approval marker exists" until you check .planning/plan-approved/<issue>.md.
• Do not say "only the older review triad exists" until you list all scripts/review/results/*plan-<issue>* artifacts.
• If approval exists but the plan changed afterward, describe it as approval-state drift / superseded approval, not absence of approval.
• If a newer self-review artifact exists, do not present it as a substitute for external cross-provider review, but do surface it so the review-artifact trail stays truthful.
• If docs/plans/README.md disagrees with GitHub labels or the approval marker, treat README as lagging convenience state, not authority.

Prompt-writing rule

When building the next adversarial-review prompt:

• only include claims you re-verified in the current session
• explicitly call out approval drift if present
• avoid absolute statements about missing markers/artifacts unless rechecked live
• prefer: "live issue is X, local marker is Y, plan header says Z; review this drift as part of the plan state"

Recommended resume sequence

1. Read the handoff
2. Recheck the six-state set above
3. Compare any preserved todo/task list against live state; after context compaction, todos may be stale relative to already-completed commits/comments/labels
4. If the gate is already complete, do a narrow verification/cleanup pass only; do not rerun reviews, repost comments, or re-apply labels just because stale todos say they are pending
5. Patch the local plan/header/review summary to match current reality when live state proves drift remains
6. Generate the fresh review prompt from the patched draft only if a material re-review is still needed
7. Run provider reruns only when the current artifact trail is missing, stale, or blocking
8. Only after any needed rerun, decide whether GitHub labels/comments/markers need rollback or promotion

Context-compaction resume guard

When resuming after a compressed handoff, treat the summary as evidence to verify, not as a command to replay. A preserved active todo list can lag behind completed operations. Before executing pending-looking steps, check:

• whether the claimed commit is already in git log / pushed to origin/main
• whether the final GitHub comment already exists
• whether labels already match the intended gate state
• whether README/plan/review artifacts already reflect the final state
• whether .planning/plan-approved/<issue>.md exists or is absent as expected

If all surfaces already agree, stop at verification and final reporting. Avoid duplicate GitHub comments, duplicate label churn, and unnecessary review reruns.

If a local-only session-state file (for example .claude/state/session-signals/*.jsonl) remains dirty after stash restoration and is unrelated to the issue gate, classify it as session churn rather than plan work; restore or stash it separately before finalizing so the planning gate stays clean.

Next-step triage after a dirty handoff

When a handoff is already committed/pushed but the worktree is still dirty, do not jump straight to implementation. First classify the dirty surfaces:

• If GitHub, plan header, and docs/plans/README.md now agree on status:plan-review, and the only approval drift is a locally deleted stale .planning/plan-approved/<issue>.md, the next logical step is a narrow governance-sync commit.
• That commit should include only the issue's governance/review-sync surfaces: stale marker deletion, plan header/review-summary updates, plan-index row update, canonical review result artifacts, and any raw review logs/prompts that those artifacts cite and that the repo convention tracks.
• Avoid bundling unrelated dirty files from other issues, provider scorecards, or session-state churn unless the user explicitly asks for a broader cleanup commit.
• After the narrow sync commit is pushed, post or verify a GitHub comment that states the issue is in status:plan-review, stale approval was intentionally removed, and user approval is still required before status:plan-approved or implementation.
• Do not recreate an approval marker or start implementation merely because reviews converged to MINOR/APPROVE; explicit user approval is still the approval gate.

Anti-patterns

• Reusing handoff language verbatim in the new review prompt
• Assuming lack of approval because the plan file says draft
• Ignoring newer same-day artifacts because older canonical files already exist
• Treating self-review artifacts as external approval evidence

Minimal verification commands

gh issue view <issue> --json labels,state,url
ls .planning/plan-approved/<issue>.md
rg -n "^\| <issue> \|" docs/plans/README.md
find scripts/review/results -maxdepth 1 -type f | sort | grep "plan-<issue>"