Plan Loop

A planning loop: it turns a prompt into a plan detailed and correct enough to hand to a lower-tier model. The artifact is the plan — plan.md (the layout) + tasks.json (PR-sized tasks, each with files, tests, dependencies, and atomic subtasks). The feedback signal is two-part, like the repo's other evaluator loops: an objective gate (tools/validate_plan.py — schema shape, an acyclic dependency graph, a valid topological order, full component coverage) and a qualitative gate (a separate principal engineer agent that critiques alignment, decomposition, testability, and whether a junior could execute each task without guessing). You build the plan from first principles, validate it, critique it, and revise until the critique passes. This is the plan stage of a larger prompt → plan → execute → debug pipeline; it stops once the plan is ready to delegate.

When to use

Use to convert a feature/bug/refactor prompt into an executable plan grounded in a real repository — when the goal is a hand-off artifact a downstream executor (or a smaller model) can implement task-by-task. The plan is only as good as its weakest task for a literal-minded implementer, so the loop optimizes for executability, not prose.