Plan Work Items

Project Context

• CLAUDE.md: !find . -maxdepth 1 -name "CLAUDE.md" -type f
• project-discovery.md: !find . -maxdepth 3 -name "project-discovery.md" -type f
• feature-implementation-plan.md: !find . -maxdepth 5 -name "feature-implementation-plan.md" -type f
• personal config directory: !bash "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/han-config-dir.sh" 2>/dev/null || echo "$HOME/.claude"
• project .han/config.md: !cat .han/config.md 2>/dev/null || echo ""

As your first action, use the Read tool on .han/config.md inside the personal config directory path above. A read that returns no file is no personal configuration: continue silently. When that file or the project .han/config.md probe supplies content, apply it per config-rule.md, which governs precedence between the two files, relative-path resolution, and what to do with a file that reads but cannot be used.

Plan Work Items

Break an implementation plan into vertical slices (tracer bullets) and write them as work items to a single work-items.md file.

This skill mostly coordinates: reading the boundary this work descends from, locating the plan or context, resolving where the file goes, printing the breakdown, writing the work-items file. It runs autonomously apart from two named turns: the confirmation turn it takes when no boundary record exists, and the single stop for an input only the user can supply. Step 5 is where the judgement comes into play, in dividing up the plan.

Operating Principles

• Run autonomously, with two named exceptions. After the initial request, run end to end without pausing for human confirmation. When a decision has a reasonable default (where the file goes, how the plan divides), make it, state it, and proceed. Print the work item breakdown for visibility, but never gate on approval to continue. Two situations are exceptions, and they are the only ones:

  • The confirmation turn, taken when no boundary record exists, per Step 0.
  • The single stop, taken once when an input only the user can supply is missing and its absence degrades the work items, per operator-escalation-rule.md.

  Beyond those two, stop only when the skill genuinely cannot continue: there is no plan or context to work from at all. An expected artifact nobody can produce right now is recorded as a gap and does not stop the run.

• One work-items file, no repository awareness. This skill produces exactly one work-items.md. Beside it, the run also writes or updates the boundary record and persists any visual material it receives, per Step 0 and planning-boundary-rule.md; those are companion artifacts, not a second breakdown. The skill does not split work by repository, count repositories, or reason about cross-repository integration. The breakdown is driven only by the plan or context it is given.

• Save incrementally — never lose work. Write the work-items file as soon as the title and intro are drafted, then append each work item as it is finalized. Do not buffer the whole document in conversation memory and write it at the end.

Rules

• Do NOT modify, annotate, or comment on the source implementation plan or context. It is read-only input. The boundary record and the visual-material folder are the exception: those the run writes, per Step 0.
• Every work item carries a justification. It is a named field of its own, **Justification.**, placed immediately before the **References.** block, never a line of summary prose. It names one of three things: the work-item language it descends from, the visual material the operator attached, or the asked-for work it is a necessity of. A work item that cannot fill it does not go in the breakdown; it goes in the cut list. Full rule in scope-justification-rule.md.
• Unjustifiable work goes in a visible cut list, in the work-items file and in the closing summary, naming what the item would have done in plain language and why it was cut. Do not search outward to a linked, sibling, or closed item to find a justification for it.
• Each work item is a vertical slice: a narrow but complete path through the relevant layers (schema, API, UI, tests) that is demoable or verifiable on its own. Not a layer, not a stub.
• Summary and acceptance criteria drive the item; criteria render at the bottom. Draft each work item's plain-language summary first and its acceptance criteria immediately after — before any detail — so every remaining block is written in support of a criterion, and detail that supports no criterion is cut. In the rendered work item, the summary opens and the acceptance criteria sit at the bottom, immediately before Depends on. Test expectations live inside the acceptance criteria; there is no separate Tests block.
• The summary is plain context, three to five very short sentences. It states why the work is needed and what work is being done, in plain language a reader can follow without the plan open. No technical detail and no ID references — plan references live in the References block, each ID paired with a one-sentence description of what it is. Never write an inline See plan: D-1, D-5 breadcrumb; an ID list without descriptions is clutter, not information.
• The detail block is a plain-language work list. After the summary, the body is a Work to be done bullet list: each bullet one to two short sentences of plain language stating a piece of the actual work. Technical detail, when needed, goes in a nested bullet under the plain-language bullet it belongs to — never mixed into the parent bullet and never as free-floating technical prose.
• Acceptance criteria are outcomes of this work item only. Never include standard operating procedure (commit pushed, CI green, PR opened, review done) — baseline practice is not a criterion. Never include a prohibition ("no new test files") unless there is an explicit, validated reason, and then state the reason with the criterion.
• Minimal technical detail — intention over prescription. A work item gives the implementer a starting point: the intention and goals of the work plus the touch points (a file path, a contract, a boundary). NEVER prescribe line-level changes or enumerate every edit, BECAUSE work items are often implemented long after they are written — a prescribed edit list goes stale against the moving codebase and misleads the human or coding agent who finally picks it up, while intention and criteria stay valid. The implementer reads the current code at build time.
• Every work item body MUST link the reference artifacts an implementer needs: API/event contracts, design frames, schema docs, runbooks, ADRs, coding standards. A work item that consumes an HTTP endpoint or event payload MUST link the contract section that defines it.
• A shared contract is pinned in one item, ahead of its consumers. When more than one work item touches the same contract — a file or wire format, a persisted schema, an API or event payload, a module or CLI signature, a config schema, an error or exit contract, an identity convention — the item that introduces it carries the concrete form in its acceptance criteria, and every consumer names that item under Depends on. Never split one contract across items that each define part of it. When the item's own deliverable is the contract document, "the document exists" is not a criterion: a criterion names the concrete form the document must carry. Full rule in contract-pinning-rule.md.
• UI work items, when the plan folder has a ui-designs/ subfolder, MUST reference the relevant visual material by a relative path from the work-items file to the file. See references/work-item-template.md. The accepted file set is named in planning-boundary-rule.md; a hosted URL the boundary record lists is cited by URL, since there is no file to reference.
• An absent ui-designs/ folder is two different situations, not one. A work item with no UI surface omits the design-reference block and that is the end of it. A work item that implements visual work with no material available is a missing artifact: report it as one, note that the upstream skill may never have persisted it, and note that the user can supply it now. One line of output for a lost visual specification is the wrong proportion.
• Depends on lists other work items in this same file that must complete first, or None.
• NEVER include process artifacts in work item bodies or the preamble. Excluded categories: iteration histories, decision logs, review findings, team findings, facilitation summaries, gap analyses, and anything under an artifacts/ subfolder of the plan that is not a contract or design reference. Restate plan-level decisions in plain language in the work item body, and cite the decision in the References block as the ID plus a one-sentence description of what it is. Full include/exclude list in references/reference-artifact-inventory.md.

Process

0. Read the boundary this work descends from

Before anything else, establish the outer boundary of the run. Read planning-boundary-rule.md for the record's name, its sections, and the accepted visual-material file set, then take one of two paths.

A boundary record already exists. Look for artifacts/scope-boundary.md in the plan's folder. When it is there, read it and use it. Do not re-ask the user for anything it already answers, including the direction-of-travel question: a recorded answer of any kind is never re-asked. When your output folder differs from the plan's folder, write your own record beside your own deliverable and name the path you inherited it from.

No boundary record exists. Establish the boundary yourself and take one confirmation turn. This is the one turn that carries more than one ask. It restates the boundary in the user's own terms, names any visual material you kept, and asks the direction-of-travel question with its subjects named from the work item you have already read. Write the record before you draft.

Before writing that turn, or the single stop later in the run, source the explanation standard by invoking han-communication:explanation-guidance. Both turns go to someone who will not open the code, so each names a concrete outcome they could observe rather than a mechanism, and keeps paths and identifiers below the question or leaves them out.

An absent record is not a recorded statement that no work item exists. Those are different, and only the second is a finding you write down.

When the user hands you a work item that conflicts with the recorded one, surface the conflict in the confirmation turn and ask which governs. Do not silently overwrite the record and do not silently trust it.

Persist any visual material the user supplies into ui-designs/ beside your deliverable as it arrives, and note each item into the record's Visual Material Received section. Copy destinations are always the resolved output folder's ui-designs/.

Before you finish, run the completeness gate: confirm that every item the record lists as received exists on disk. The gate covers only material this run received. Material an earlier skill already persisted is not this run's to account for; Step 4's inventory is what reads the folder for that.

That scoping is what the record you write has to carry. This skill can hold two boundary records: one inherited from the input plan's folder, and one beside its own deliverable. List in your own record's Visual Material Received section only the material this run received, and name the inherited record's path in Record Provenance, which the boundary rule already requires. Copying inherited rows into your own record would send the gate looking for files in a folder this run never populated, and it would fail on material nobody lost.

1. Locate the implementation plan or context

The breakdown is built from an implementation plan when one exists, or from whatever context the user provided when one does not.

• If the user provided a file path, read it. If a feature name was given, look for docs/features/<feature-name>/feature-implementation-plan.md (or the equivalent under the project's documentation root).
• If nothing was provided, check for existing plans (the injected feature-implementation-plan.md results above help here). If there is exactly one, use it. If there are multiple, use the most recently updated one. If there are none, use whatever plan-like context the user supplied inline in the conversation.
• If the plan references other files (a feature specification, a contract file, an ADR), read those too. The plan content is the union of all these sources.
• If there is still no usable plan or context, ask the user — in one short message — for the implementation plan file path or the context to break down. Do not proceed without it.

2. Resolve the output location

The breakdown is one file: {folder}/work-items.md. The boundary record and any visual material go beside it, at {folder}/artifacts/scope-boundary.md and {folder}/ui-designs/, so the same {folder} resolves all three.

Resolve {folder} in this order:

1. If the user specified an output folder, use it.
2. If the plan is a file, default to the same folder as the plan file.
3. If there is no plan file but the provided context points at a folder or document location, write next to that.
4. Otherwise, make a best educated guess based on the provided context: choose a folder of 2 to 4 words in kebab-case, placed under an existing documentation root surfaced via CLAUDE.md, project-discovery.md, or a Glob fallback (docs/features/<feature>/, docs/plans/, docs/). State the chosen folder in one short line and proceed; do not wait for confirmation.

If work-items.md already exists in the chosen folder, do not silently overwrite it and do not stop to ask: write to a timestamp-suffixed name (e.g., work-items-2026-05-18.md) and state which file was written. The existing file is preserved.

3. Explore the codebase when needed

If the plan references existing code or boundaries that aren't in your context, explore the affected code. Skip exploration if the plan is self-contained and the boundaries are already clear.