Planning Workflow

How to use plans effectively to scope work and generate tickets.

When to use plans

Use plans when work spans multiple tickets or needs upfront design. Skip plans for self-contained bugs or small tasks — go straight to a ticket.

Good candidates for planning:

• New features with multiple components
• Architecture changes affecting several modules
• Migrations or large refactors
• Features where you want AI input on approach

The workflow

1. Write a rough outline

Start with bullet points or a rough description. Don't worry about structure or completeness. Include:

• What you want to build
• Key requirements and constraints
• Technical considerations you're aware of

2. Get AI suggestions

Click Suggest. The AI reads your outline and the project's codebase, then suggests:

• Structure and organization
• Technical details based on your actual code
• Missing considerations
• Potential implementation steps

Suggestions appear as ghost text. Accept what's useful, dismiss what's not.

3. Iterate

Edit the plan based on suggestions. Add your own details, remove irrelevant suggestions, refine the approach. Trigger suggestions again — the AI sees your edits and builds on them.

Repeat until the plan covers everything needed.

4. Check readiness

Click Check Readiness. This quick check tells you if the plan has enough detail to generate tickets from. If not, it explains what's missing.

The readiness check is lenient. Any plan with substantive content typically passes.

5. Extract tickets

Click Extract Tickets. The AI generates structured tickets from your plan:

• Each ticket gets a title, description, kind, and priority
• Tickets are ordered by suggested implementation sequence
• Dependencies are noted in descriptions

Review the extracted tickets. Edit titles, descriptions, or priorities as needed.

6. Approve

Click Approve to create all extracted tickets in the project's tracker. The plan moves to the Approved state.

Tips for effective planning

• Start broad, refine narrow. Let the AI help with structure before you dive into details.
• Include file names and paths when you know them. The AI uses these to look up actual code and give more specific suggestions.
• State constraints early. "Must use the existing auth middleware" or "Cannot add new dependencies" focuses the AI's suggestions.
• Separate concerns. If a plan covers two unrelated features, split it into two plans. Ticket extraction works better with focused plans.
• Don't over-polish the plan itself. The plan is a tool for generating tickets. Once tickets are extracted, the plan has served its purpose.

Plan vs. ticket description

Plans and ticket descriptions serve different purposes:

The extract step bridges the two: it takes high-level plan content and produces specific, actionable tickets.