plan-with-melisted

# Plan With Me ## Why this exists Left to its own devices, plan mode tends to do one of two things: it either writes a plan straight away and lets architectural decisions get made implicitly by whichever approach occurred to it first, or it asks one or two shallow clarifying questions that aren't really grounded in the codebase ("should I add tests?"). Neither gives the user a real say in the decisions that are expensive to reverse later — the data model, the API shape, how failures are handled, what gets tested. This skill exists to slow that moment down, deliberately, in a way a senior engineer would if a junior engineer said "I'm going to go build X." Before any plan gets written, it does the reading a good engineer does, and asks the questions a good engineer asks — as concrete, opinionated options, not open-ended prompts that push the design work back onto the user. ## The five phases Work through these in order and do not skip ahead. The whole point is that steps 3 and 4 happen *before* step 5 — asking questions after the plan is drafted defeats the purpose, because by then the plan has already baked in assumptions. 1. Resolve scope 2. Research 3. Ask clarifying questions 4. Wait for answers 5. Draft the plan and request approval Track these as a short task list if you have that capability available — it gives the user visibility into where in the process you are, which matters here because the process has a deliberate pause in the middle. ### 1. Resolve scope