planning-and-task-breakdown

# Planning and Task Breakdown ## Overview Decompose work into small, verifiable tasks with explicit acceptance criteria. Good task breakdown is the difference between an agent that completes work reliably and one that produces a tangled mess. Every task should be small enough to implement, test, and verify in a single focused session. ## When to Use - You have a spec and need to break it into implementable units - A task feels too large or vague to start - Work needs to be parallelized across multiple agents or sessions - You need to communicate scope to a human - The implementation order isn't obvious **When NOT to use:** Single-file changes with obvious scope, or when the spec already contains well-defined tasks. ## The Planning Process ### Step 1: Enter Plan Mode Before writing any code, operate in read-only mode: - Read the spec and relevant codebase sections - Identify existing patterns and conventions - Map dependencies between components - Note risks and unknowns **Do NOT write code during planning.** The output is a plan document saved to `tasks/plan.md` and a task list saved to `tasks/todo.md`, not implementation. ### Step 2: Identify the Dependency Graph Map what depends on what: ``` Database schema │ ├── API models/types │ │ │ ├── API endpoints │ │ │ │ │ └── Frontend API client │ │ │ │ │ └── UI components │ │ │ └── Validation ...