planning-and-task-breakdownlisted

# 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. Planning is not a rubber-stamp phase. Preserve the user's desired outcome and explicit constraints, but independently evaluate any implementation approach the user proposed. If a materially better route exists, recommend it before turning the weaker route into tasks. ## 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 - Separate the user's desired outcome/hard constraints from their suggested implementation method **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`, no