Planning & Project Management for Claude Code

Interview the user relentlessly about a plan or design until reaching shared understanding, resolving each branch of the decision tree. Use when user wants to stress-test a plan, get grilled on their design, or mentions "grill me".

Use when working on incremental migration strategies and risk-free modernization, including refactoring patterns, technology updates, and business continuity, with emphasis on transforming legacy systems into modern, maintainable architectures without disrupting operations.

Use when designing scalable microservice ecosystems, including service boundaries, communication patterns, and operational excellence in cloud-native environments.

This skill should be used when the user asks to "plan a penetration test", "create a security assessment checklist", "prepare for penetration testing", "define pentest scope", "follow security testing best practices", or needs a structured methodology for penetration testing engagements.

Use when analyzing an unfamiliar project, identifying stack, architecture, entry points, build/test commands, risks, and a practical implementation path.

Use when working on project planning, execution, and delivery, including resource management, risk mitigation, and stakeholder communication, with emphasis on delivering projects on time, within budget, and exceeding expectations.

Software project effort estimation assistant. Outputs three-point estimates (optimistic/most-likely/pessimistic values with confidence intervals), T-shirt sizes, or Function Point Analysis (FPA) counts. Triggered when users ask 'how long will this feature take,' need to assess project workload, perform PERT estimation, T-shirt sizing, FPA, sprint planning, or quote-based effort breakdowns.

Use when working on comprehensive risk assessment, mitigation strategies, and compliance frameworks, including risk modeling, stress testing, and regulatory compliance, with emphasis on protecting organizations from financial, operational, and strategic risks.

Use when working on technical pre-sales, solution architecture, and proof of concepts, including technical demonstrations, competitive positioning, and translating complex technology into business value for prospects and customers.

Use when working on complex process design, state machine implementation, business process automation, error compensation, and reliable workflow coordination.

Public Builder skills for docs-first discipline, autonomous execution, cross-agent review, efficient agent workflows, clear status recaps, and Agent-Native Plan modes.

Surface the most valuable next action by combining task stack, queue state, inbox pressure, health, and goals. Recommends one specific action with rationale. Triggers on "/next", "what should I do", "what's next".

Plan vault restructuring from config changes. Compares config.yaml against derivation.md, identifies dimension shifts, shows restructuring plan, executes on approval. Triggers on "/refactor", "restructure vault".

View and manage the task stack and processing queue. Shows pending work, active tasks, completed items, and queue state. Triggers on "/tasks", "show tasks", "what's pending", "task list", "queue status".

Your vault's foundation, blueprint, and building code, all in one agent.

> Unified timeline of all deadlines from emails, calendar, and vault. Groups by urgency (overdue, critical 48h, upcoming 7d, distant) with alert levels. Triggers: EN: "deadline radar", "what are my deadlines", "this week's deadlines", "upcoming deadlines". IT: "scadenze", "radar scadenze", "le mie scadenze", "scadenze della settimana". FR: "échéances", "radar des échéances". ES: "fechas límite", "radar de plazos". DE: "Fristen-Radar", "meine Fristen". PT: "radar de prazos", "meus prazos".

> Weekly vault defragmentation. Runs a 5-phase structural audit: inbox hygiene, area completeness, project archival, MOC refresh, tag consistency, structure evolution, and generates a report. Triggers: EN: "defragment the vault", "reorganize the vault", "structural maintenance", "vault defrag", "weekly defrag". IT: "deframmenta il vault", "riorganizza il vault", "manutenzione strutturale", "defrag settimanale". FR: "defragmenter le vault", "reorganiser le vault". ES: "desfragmentar el vault", "r

> Prepare a comprehensive brief for an upcoming meeting. Gathers participant context, related emails, past meeting notes, and vault references into a structured prep document. Triggers: EN: "prepare for meeting", "meeting prep", "brief me for the meeting", "get ready for the call". IT: "prepara la riunione", "brief per il meeting", "preparami per la call". FR: "préparer la réunion", "brief pour le meeting". ES: "preparar la reunión", "brief para la reunión". DE: "Meeting vorbereiten", "Besprechu

> Generate a day-by-day overview of the week combining calendar events, email deadlines, and vault tasks into a single structured agenda. Triggers: EN: "weekly agenda", "what's this week", "week overview", "plan my week". IT: "agenda settimanale", "cosa c'è questa settimana", "panoramica della settimana". FR: "agenda de la semaine", "programme de la semaine". ES: "agenda semanal", "qué hay esta semana". DE: "Wochenagenda", "Wochenübersicht". PT: "agenda semanal", "o que tem esta semana".

Use when the quest needs an explicit go, stop, branch, reuse-baseline, write, finalize, reset, or user-decision transition with reasons and evidence.

Core operating contract shared by all DeepScientist quest turns.

Shared execution contract for specialized DeepScientist workers.

Use when the quest is ready to consolidate final claims, limitations, recommendations, summary state, and graph exports before stopping or archiving.

Lead orchestrator for the DeepScientist research graph.

Use when a quest needs problem framing, literature scouting, dataset or metric clarification, or baseline discovery before deeper work.

AG2 architecture advisor that recommends agent patterns and orchestration strategies. Invoke when designing a multi-agent system, choosing between group chat, pipeline, swarm, or nested chat patterns.

System architecture specialist for design decisions, ADR creation, scalability assessment, and technology selection

The Boss of the business team. Senior strategy consultant who has run P&Ls and watched many decks meet reality. Listens, then calls the decision.

The Rookie of the business team. Business-school intern energy. Asks about the business model, the customer, the money, in plain language. Forces the plan to make sense.

The Boss of the design team. Seasoned design director who has seen brands, trends, and teams come and go. Listens carefully, then calls the decision.

The Boss of the dev team. Senior architect with 20 years of scars. Listens, synthesizes, and makes the final call at the end.

The Cynic of the dev team. The seasoned dev who teases the others, calls out absurdity, and brings the room back to common sense with humor and a sharp eye.

The Pusher of the dev team. The bold engineer who wants to use the new thing, rewrite the old thing, and push the stack forward. Move now, debate later.

The Rookie of the dev team. Junior-curious energy. Asks the naive questions that force the room to explain itself. Not there to contest, there to understand and sharpen the thinking.

Classifies a single planning document as ADR, PRD, SPEC, DOC, or UNKNOWN. Extracts title, scope summary, and cross-references. Spawned in parallel by /gsd:ingest-docs. Writes a JSON classification file and returns a one-line confirmation.

Synthesizes classified planning docs into a single consolidated context. Applies precedence rules, detects cross-ref cycles, enforces LOCKED-vs-LOCKED hard-blocks, and writes INGEST-CONFLICTS.md with three buckets (auto-resolved, competing-variants, unresolved-blockers). Spawned by /gsd:ingest-docs.

Designs a structured evaluation strategy for an AI phase. Identifies critical failure modes, selects eval dimensions with rubrics, recommends tooling, and specifies the reference dataset. Writes the Evaluation Strategy, Guardrails, and Production Monitoring sections of AI-SPEC.md. Spawned by /gsd:ai-integration-phase orchestrator.

Analyzes codebase for existing patterns and produces PATTERNS.md mapping new files to closest analogs. Read-only codebase analysis spawned by /gsd:plan-phase orchestrator before planning.

Researches how to implement a phase before planning. Produces RESEARCH.md consumed by gsd-planner. Spawned by /gsd:plan-phase orchestrator.

Verifies plans will achieve phase goal before execution. Goal-backward analysis of plan quality. Spawned by /gsd:plan-phase orchestrator.