Plan Creating Project Plans

Creating Project Plans

Purpose

This Skill provides guidance for creating structured project plans in the plans/ directory. Plans follow standardized organization, naming conventions, and acceptance criteria patterns for executable, traceable project work.

When to use this Skill:

• Creating new project plans
• Organizing backlog items
• Converting ideas to structured plans
• Writing Gherkin acceptance criteria
• Structuring multi-phase projects
• Moving plans through workflow stages

Authorization gate: creating a tracked plan requires a literal user plan request or explicit plan-authoring invocation. Plan Mode, internal task planning, discovery, and omitted tester output mode do not authorize plans/ writes.

Start here — mandatory grilling: before writing, resolve material design decisions that cannot be answered from repository evidence. After writing, run a separate validation/stress-test grill against the completed artifacts before signaling done. See mandatory-grilling.md.

Minimal Sufficiency in Plans

Treat the requested outcome, explicit non-goals and out-of-scope items, acceptance criteria, and required quality gates as the plan's boundary and stop condition. When a plan introduces code, a dependency, abstraction, validator, automation, infrastructure, or another lasting mechanism, the chosen technical form must name its concrete need and explain why existing mechanisms are insufficient. Choose the smallest responsible design that satisfies every applicable rule; mandatory safeguards remain part of sufficiency. See Plans Best Practices.

Automatic Rule-Impact Coverage

During authoring, classify both proposed behaviour and the file-impact tree against the full repo rules surface. If any scoped repository may add, change, supersede, or delete a rule or enforcement, delivery.md automatically includes the complete repository-local rules-propagation outcome in that delivery unit. Split inventory, conflict/precedence, placement/eviction, canonical and enforcement edits, enforcement dispositions, binding generation, verification plus rules-quality-gate, manifest/final status, and sibling obligation into granular bootcamp-executable checkboxes. Repeat per affected repository; a link, generic invocation, or reusable checkbox template is insufficient because every concrete repository/action pair must map to its own execution task.

Primary Junior-Readable Surfaces

Write the selected technical form and delivery.md for a junior engineer fresh from bootcamp with no professional work experience and no repository or stack context. The technical form teaches the current state, relevant concepts, alternatives, contracts, architecture, migration/rollback, and verification design. delivery.md turns that design into ordered granular actions with the exact inputs, paths/discovery, commands, expected observations, failure handling, and evidence needed for independent execution.

Delivery units follow the canonical natural-seam, immediately deployable-state, and temporary-flag lifecycle rules; numeric counts never set their boundaries.

Reference Modules

• mandatory-grilling.md — evidence-first pre-write and post-write grilling
• plan-lifecycle-and-git-workflow.md — 4-stage lifecycle + git workflow
• plan-folder-and-naming.md — plans/ folder layout, stage-aware naming, and runtime-only completion dates
• plan-structure-multi-and-single-file.md — fixed mature-plan core and reader-led technical shape
• mermaid-diagrams.md — Mermaid diagram requirements
• ui-design-funnel.md — UI-design-funnel HARD RULE (diverge→narrow→select→justify)
• ui-design-funnel-grilling-and-learning-plans.md — funnel grilling questions + Learning-Bearing syllabus record
• worktree-specification.md — mandatory ## Worktree declaration
• delivery-mode.md — the four Delivery Modes + per-repo restriction
• execution-grade-clarity.md — Execution-Grade Clarity HARD RULE
• executor-tagging.md — [AI]/[HUMAN] tagging HARD RULE
• phases-as-natural-pauses.md — Phase-Gate + Pause-Safety template
• verification-recipes.md — pre-write verification recipes + confidence labels
• refuse-uncertainty-and-anti-patterns.md — refuse-on-uncertainty + AP-1..AP-10 catalog
• specialized-executor-annotation.md — suggested-executor annotation
• gherkin-acceptance-criteria.md — Gherkin format and journey coherence
• delivery-plan-tdd-structure.md — outcome-section and granular RED/GREEN/REFACTOR evidence shape
• operational-readiness.md — Local Quality Gates, Post-Push, Env Setup, Commits
• manual-ui-and-api-verification.md — Playwright/curl manual verification
• manual-verification-retest-rules.md — rule-15/rule-16 pre-archival retests
• knowledge-capture-scaffold-and-entries.md — learnings.md scaffold + entry shape
• knowledge-capture-phase-template.md — Knowledge Capture phase template
• plan-archival.md — Plan Archival section template
• common-mistakes.md — 5 common authoring mistakes

References

Primary Convention: Plans Organization Convention

Related Skills: grill-me, plan-writing-gherkin-criteria, repo-practicing-trunk-based-development, docs-applying-content-quality.