planlisted

# Planning and Task Breakdown Decompose work into small, verifiable tasks with explicit acceptance criteria — each small enough to implement, test, and verify in one focused session. **Use when:** a spec needs breaking into implementable units; a task feels too large or vague to start; work could be parallelized across agents/sessions; scope must be communicated to a human; implementation order isn't obvious. **NOT for:** single-file changes with obvious scope, or specs that already contain well-defined tasks. ## Step 0: Required Reading (blocking, before any breakdown) Planning is **read-only** — the output is a plan document, never code. 1. `references/SKILL.md` — doc index; route to every reference relevant to the request. 2. `references/development/conventions.md` — any plan whose tasks touch code must respect it. 3. `references/development/architecture.md` — the layer map and the content-collection contract; a task that changes the schema changes every case study. Skipping Step 0 is a planning failure — restart here. Docs drift: `grep` any file/route/ flag a doc names before building on it. > **No `references/SKILL.md`?** The reference layer isn't set up here — skip Step 0 and plan > from the codebase itself. **Say so at the top of the run.** Don't invent a reference doc, > and don't halt over its absence. [`/setup`](../setup/SKILL.md) builds it, in either mode. ## Step 1: Break the Request Down Slice **vertically** — each task delivers one complete, testable