planning-for-handofflisted

# Planning for Handoff ## Overview A plan is a contract between two people: the author who understands the problem and the executor who will solve it. The test is simple and absolute: hand your plan to a skilled developer who has never seen this codebase. Can they execute it start to finish without sending you a single Slack message? If the answer is no, the plan is not done. Even if you are executing your own plan — solo path, no handoff — the same rigor applies. Future-you does not remember why you chose that approach, which file had the pattern you wanted to follow, or what edge cases you considered and dismissed. Write every plan as if the executor is a stranger. ## Process Follow these 9 steps in order. Each exists because skipping it causes a specific failure described under Failure Modes. **Where the plan lives.** Save the plan where this repo keeps plans: if the repo's CLAUDE.md (or the user) specifies a location — e.g. `.claude/plans/current.md` — use that; otherwise default to `docs/exloom/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-plan.md`. Commit it so it is reviewable and so the person who executes it — including a future session — can find it. ### Step 1: Start from a spec **What to do.** Confirm you have a spec or design document before writing the first line of the plan. If no spec exists, stop and invoke `exloom:brainstorming` to produce one. **How to do it well.** A spec answers "what are we building and why." A plan answers "how do we build it, in what order, with