Development Loop Skills

The research → plan → implement spine, plus the review companions that harden a plan before any code is written. For the narrative — how the phases hand off through the meta/ directory — see the Development Loop overview.

The spine

Run these in order for any non-trivial change:

1. research-codebase spawns parallel subagents and synthesises what it finds into a research document in meta/research/codebase/. Run it first so the plan can cite concrete findings rather than guesses.
2. create-plan builds a phased implementation plan in meta/plans/ through interactive collaboration, with success criteria per phase.
3. implement-plan executes an approved plan phase by phase, checking off success criteria in the plan file as each phase completes.

Hardening a plan

Two complementary skills sit between plan and implementation:

• review-plan applies the fixed quality lenses of the Review System and iterates on the findings.
• stress-test-plan interrogates your reasoning interactively — decisions, edge cases, and assumptions — to find gaps before implementation begins.

Use review for systematic coverage, stress-test when the plan rests on judgement calls you want challenged. They compose: many changes warrant both.

Closing the loop

validate-plan runs after implementation. It verifies each success criterion against the actual code, records a validation report in meta/validations/, and surfaces anything that drifted from the plan.