plan

$plan transforms a vague idea or detailed brief into a structured, quality-gated work plan before any code is written. It auto-detects whether your request needs interactive requirements gathering or can go straight to a plan, and supports a consensus mode that iterates a Planner, Architect, and Critic in a deliberation loop until all three agree.

When to use

• You want to plan before implementing — "plan this", "plan the", "let's plan"
• Your request is broad or vague and needs scoping before execution starts
• You want an existing plan reviewed with --review
• You want multi-perspective consensus validation with --consensus
• You prefer structured acceptance criteria and risk mitigations over ad-hoc coding

How to invoke

Natural language triggers: "plan this", "plan the", "let's plan", "ralplan" (activates --consensus).

Explicit slash: $plan

codex
> plan the migration from REST to GraphQL for the user service

codex
> $plan --consensus add real-time notifications via WebSocket to the dashboard

codex
> $plan --review   # evaluates an existing plan in .omx/plans/

What happens

Plan first classifies the request: broad or vague inputs trigger interview mode, which asks one focused question at a time and spawns an explore agent to answer codebase questions before asking the user. Specific inputs skip the interview and generate a plan directly. In consensus mode (--consensus), the skill runs a Planner, Architect, and Critic in sequence — Architect steelmans the alternative options, Critic verifies testable criteria and rejects vague risks — iterating up to five rounds until the Critic approves. The final plan is written to .omx/plans/ with an ADR section documenting the decision, drivers, alternatives considered, and consequences. Plans meet a quality bar of 80% file-cited claims and 90% testable acceptance criteria before being considered complete.

Outputs

• .omx/plans/{slug}.md — approved work plan with requirements, acceptance criteria, implementation steps, risks, and verification steps
• In consensus mode: RALPLAN-DR summary (principles, decision drivers, viable options) and ADR section
• In deliberate consensus mode: pre-mortem with three failure scenarios and an expanded unit, integration, e2e, and observability test plan

Related skills

• $ralplan — alias for $plan --consensus with deliberation options
• $deep-interview — deeper Socratic interview for highly ambiguous briefs
• $autopilot — end-to-end execution that uses plan internally