Milestone Planning (Ultraplan)

Decomposes a complex task into milestones in three moves: explore the codebase broadly in parallel, draft a milestone DAG grounded in what exploration found, then submit the draft to a panel of adversarial critics who attack it in rounds until it survives.

Core Principle

Milestones are the unit of long-running execution. A bad milestone decomposition cascades into days of wasted work. Two things prevent that:

• Grounding. The draft is built from actual codebase evidence gathered by parallel exploration — not from assumptions about what the code probably looks like.
• Adversarial pressure. Independent critics whose only job is to break the draft, before execution does it the expensive way.

A critic needs a concrete artifact to attack. This is why drafting comes before critique: "review the problem" produces suggestions; "break this draft" produces findings.

Hard Gates