Planning Workflow — The Foundation of Agentic Development

Core Philosophy: "Planning tokens are a lot fewer and cheaper than implementation tokens."

The models are far smarter when reasoning about a detailed plan that fits within their context window. This is the key insight behind spending 80%+ of time on planning.

Outcome — When This Skill Has Delivered

You have a usable plan when all of the following hold:

• The plan is self-contained: a fresh agent who has never seen the project can read it and start implementing without asking the human for clarification.
• It is dependency-aware: every non-trivial task names what blocks it and what it unblocks, so the work decomposes cleanly into a beads graph.
• It is justified: every architectural choice and every non-obvious feature has at least one sentence on why, not just what — future agents need the rationale to make consistent local decisions.
• It has survived at least 4 review rounds by a strong reasoning model (GPT Pro Extended Reasoning is the proven choice) and reached steady-state — i.e., the most recent round produces marginal rather than structural revisions.
• It has been converted to beads with the dependency graph intact, so implementation agents can pick up ready work via br ready --json without re-reading the plan.