Planning Workflow

Planning produces artifacts that a build agent can execute without ambiguity. The templates in this skill enforce the discipline that separates planning from implementation: design decisions are made before structure is committed, structure is committed before implementation is tasked, and each implementation phase is independently verifiable.

The core constraint across all templates: no implementation detail in the design phase, no design decisions in the plan phase, no new behavior in a verification gate.

Vertical Slicing

All implementation plans produced with this skill decompose work into vertical slices — units of change that deliver one complete, observable behavior end-to-end, from the outermost interface to the innermost dependency.

A vertical slice is not a layer (not "implement the database layer"). It is a behavior (e.g., "a user can place an order and receive a confirmation").

Each slice:

• Has a failing test written before any implementation begins (TDD red phase)
• Delivers something demonstrable at its verification gate
• Can be deployed or rolled back independently of other slices