planning-and-task-breakdown

1# Planning and Task Breakdown
2 
3## Overview
4 
5Decompose 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.
6 
7## When to Use
8 
9- You have a spec and need to break it into implementable units
10- A task feels too large or vague to start
11- Work needs to be parallelized across multiple agents or sessions
12- You need to communicate scope to a human
13- The implementation order isn't obvious
14 
15**When NOT to use:** Single-file changes with obvious scope, or when the spec already contains well-defined tasks.
16 
17## The Planning Process
18 
19### Step 1: Enter Plan Mode
20 
21Before writing any code, operate in read-only mode:
22 
23- Read the spec and relevant codebase sections
24- Identify existing patterns and conventions
25- Map dependencies between components
26- Note risks and unknowns
27 
28**Do NOT write code during planning.** The output is a plan document saved to `tasks/plan.md` and a task list recorded in the task list target (see Output Files; default `tasks/todo.md`), not implementation.
29 
30### Step 2: Identify the Dependency Graph
31 
32Map what depends on what:
33 
34```
35Database schema
36    │
37    ├── API models/types
38    │       │
39    │       ├── API endpoints
40    │       │       │
41    │       │       └── Frontend API client
42    │       │               │
43…