Planning Conventions

These are non-negotiable personal conventions unless explicitly overridden by the user.

• Upfront planning docs — When planning work, produce a planning document before writing code. Structure it for humans who will skim:

  • TL;DR section at the top — summary of approach, key decisions, risks.
  • Detailed sections below for those who want depth.

• Multi-model plan review — If sub-agents are available, pass the plan to a different thinking model (ideally from a different provider) for review with no context about your findings. Iterate between multiple models until general consensus emerges. Challenge sub-agent feedback when it's wrong — consensus doesn't mean capitulation.

• Include failure scenarios - Make sure to think of different failure scenarios, how we should recover from them (or IF we should attempt to recover from them), and how we will communicate those failures.

• Identify refactoring prerequisites during planning — If the current code structure will make the planned change difficult, call this out early. Propose preparatory refactoring MRs that ship first.

• Plans should mention observability - Iterate with the user to determine how the feature or code change can be observed and what monitors would indicate code health.