Plan Gate — think on paper before touching code — refactor-chain · plan

Bundle: refactor-chain (self-diagnosing, self-healing fix-it pipeline). Phase: plan — runs after orchestrate.mjs init builds the step list, before baseline may run · Prerequisite: an initialized chain (init succeeded, state.json exists) · Next: refactor-safety-net (baseline). Adaptivity / conditional: repo-agnostic; the spec-kit interop branch activates only when diagnose reports the spec-kit signal (.specify/ directory detected).

Purpose

No multi-edit work starts on impulse. This skill forces one cheap artifact into existence first: a mini-plan of five parts — the goal in one sentence, the unknowns that could sink the work, the success criteria that will prove it worked, the step order mapped onto the chain's step list, and what is explicitly out of scope (adjacent things noticed but deliberately not touched — the boundary refactor-scope-fence then enforces). The plan is recorded into chain state as a note, and until it is recorded, the baseline phase stays locked. Five minutes of writing routinely saves an hour of undoing.