planning

Writing the plan for a build into the world it is a plan for.

The job this skill covers is not "decide what to do" — an agent does that anyway, in its own head, every turn. It is: get that decision out of the conversation and into the world's source, where it survives the session, the other people in the world can read it, and the history can date it against the work.

It exists because the three obvious places to keep a plan all fail. In the conversation, it is lost at the next compaction — and what compacts first is the middle, which is exactly where the reasoning for the order was. In the agent's own private storage, nobody else in a multiplayer world can see it, which defeats the point of announcing intent before acting on it. In a reply, it is gone the moment the person scrolls.

Covers: where to put the plan and what to call it; writing steps as outcomes somebody could look at and settle, rather than phases that can only be abandoned; ordering the work so something is visible on a live screen early; committing the plan before building against it, so intent is dated ahead of the change; and keeping it honest as steps land.

The trap it spends the most words on is the plan that quietly stops matching the build. It is worse than having no plan, because people go on reading it and believing it — so a change of shape is a rewrite and a commit, not a silent divergence, and a step is ticked when the thing it names has been checked, not when the code that should do it was written.