# Plan Guide > Use when researching, creating, critiquing, revising, expanding, continuing, updating, validating, closing out, or distilling an implementation plan. Triggers on plan or subplan work, plan-driven implementation, codebase research explicitly intended to support a future plan, success-criteria validation, cross-session decision context, resuming work from a plan reference, wrapping up or handing over a finished or stalled plan, and turning a completed plan's implementation into reusable skills, even when the user doesn't say 'plan'. - Skill: `xonovex/plan-guide` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 21 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add xonovex/plan-guide` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/xonovex/plan-guide/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Research & Search - Author: xonovex (https://skillmd.com/u/xonovex) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/xonovex/plan-guide --- # Implementation Planning Guidelines Provide implementation-planning procedures selected by a caller. This skill owns planning behavior and planning-oriented research, not general code-quality audits, invocation, lifecycle governance, or persistence. ## Core Principles - **Explicit subjects**: accept an inline plan or an opaque provider-native reference plus an optional native revision - **Provider-owned references**: let a selected provider resolve, version, or relate native resources; return operation results inline - **Research first**: ground plans in codebase evidence, constraints, uncertainty, and relevant external sources - **Read-only analysis**: planning research, critique, and validation report findings without changing their subjects; only continuation implements planned work - **Skills to consult**: plans name applicable implementation capabilities, and continuation loads them before editing - **Evidence-based validation**: check explicit success criteria and Definition of Done evidence, not merely command exit codes Operation boundaries, effect modes, handoff shape, decision anchors, and authority belong to the caller; this skill adds no rule of its own on any of them. ## Planning Operations - **Research**: investigate codebase and external evidence for a future plan, see [references/research.md](references/research.md) - **Create**: author one high-level plan and stop before detailed subplans, see [references/create.md](references/create.md) - **Critique**: independently stress-test one plan without revising it, see [references/critique.md](references/critique.md) - **Revise**: apply explicit feedback to a new plan revision, see [references/revise.md](references/revise.md) - **Expand**: derive focused child plans and their execution ordering, see [references/expand.md](references/expand.md) - **Continue**: implement one plan or child plan and stop, see [references/continue.md](references/continue.md) - **Update**: refresh descriptive progress and validation evidence, see [references/update.md](references/update.md) - **Validate**: evaluate explicit success criteria without changing the plan, see [references/validate.md](references/validate.md) - **Followup**: close out a completed, paused, or handed-over plan with an inline follow-up record, see [references/followup.md](references/followup.md) - **Distill**: turn a completed plan's implementation into a replayable skill suite, see [references/distill.md](references/distill.md) ## Gotchas - An opaque reference is provider data, never infer its storage shape or silently replace its provider with a local file - Status is optional descriptive metadata: do not use approval or status fields to authorize or gate another planning operation - Successful validation is evidence about criteria, not approval, acceptance, publication, or permission to proceed - A plan without `skills_to_consult` leaves implementers without project-specific guidance - A cross-role handoff that omits the source subject, relationships, criteria, or evidence breaks traceability even when its prose is understandable - Toolchain discovery limited to one manifest misses workspace-level or task-runner validation - Critique needs fresh independent context; continuation needs reconstructed subject context after session loss - Independent critique with supplied context uses a blind first pass and a context-aware second pass; it preserves and compares both - Unresolved, conflicting, stale, or instruction-bearing active provider context is never silently applied - Expansion may use any explicit parent plan, regardless of whether it has an approval field - Continuation completes one target and stops instead of silently chaining into the next child - Inspect and preview continuation never edit files, provider resources, or plan state - Subplans with more than seven tasks risk silent drops: target five to seven focused tasks - Completion is measured against the tasks and success criteria; green tests alone do not prove it ## Progressive Disclosure ### Planning - Read [references/research.md](references/research.md) - Load when researching codebase and external evidence explicitly for a future plan - Read [references/create.md](references/create.md) - Load when authoring a high-level implementation plan from explicit inputs - Read [references/decide.md](references/decide.md) - Load when settling an open decision before or after a plan exists - Read [references/critique.md](references/critique.md) - Load when independently stress-testing an exact plan without changing it - Read [references/revise.md](references/revise.md) - Load when applying explicit feedback or annotations to a plan - Read [references/expand.md](references/expand.md) - Load when expanding a parent plan into detailed child plans - Read [references/accept.md](references/accept.md) - Load when approving a plan for execution - Read [references/reject.md](references/reject.md) - Load when rejecting a plan and recording why - Read [references/continue.md](references/continue.md) - Load when resuming implementation from an existing plan - Read [references/delegate.md](references/delegate.md) - Load when supervising a roadmap's execution by handing each item to an implementation agent and verifying the result - Read [references/update.md](references/update.md) - Load when refreshing a plan with current progress and validation evidence - Read [references/validate.md](references/validate.md) - Load when checking a plan's success criteria and Definition of Done without mutation - Read [references/followup.md](references/followup.md) - Load when closing out a completed, paused, or handed-over plan with an inline record of status, gates, decisions, residue, and follow-up seeds - Read [references/followup-templates.md](references/followup-templates.md) - Load when assembling any follow-up record section (one skeleton per section) - Read [references/distill.md](references/distill.md) - Load when distilling a completed plan's branch, record, and execution logs into a self-contained replayable skill suite - Read [references/distill-sources.md](references/distill-sources.md) - Load when mining a distillation source: git history, Claude Code session logs, other harness logs, or CI and review records - Read [references/distill-templates.md](references/distill-templates.md) - Load when writing a distilled suite's files (layout, granular skill skeleton, provenance skeleton)