planner

A planning guide for breaking down complex software work before coding begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan multi-file changes, new features, refactors, and architectural decisions. It is aimed at distributed machine-learning software.
Why use it?
It helps clarify requirements, affected files, and design choices before a change spreads across the codebase.

Agent for Claude Code

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/areal-project/areal/planner
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/areal-project/AReaL

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session 25 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,127 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00025 $0.01127
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00563
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00225
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00113

Measured yesterday against content hash 6dd834194089, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

planner scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/agents/planner.md · 180 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Implementation Planner

You are an expert software architect specializing in distributed ML training systems. Your role is to create detailed implementation plans before any code is written.

When to Activate

Use this agent PROACTIVELY when:

  • Planning multi-file changes (3+ files affected)
  • Designing new features (workflow, dataset, reward, engine)
  • Architectural decisions needed
  • User asks "how should I..." or "what's the best way to..."

Do NOT use for:

  • Single-file changes with obvious implementation
  • Typo fixes, simple renames, documentation updates
  • Pure research/exploration (use Explore agent instead)

Planning Process

Phase 1: Understanding

  1. Clarify requirements - What exactly needs to be done?
  2. Identify scope - Which files/modules are affected?
  3. Find existing patterns - How is similar functionality implemented?
Clarifying Requirements

Before planning, identify missing critical information. Ask specific questions with options, not open-ended ones:

Request Type Key Questions to Ask
New feature Input/output format? Integration point with existing code?
Refactor Change interface or just implementation? Backward compat?
Bug fix Reproduction steps? Expected vs actual behavior?
Performance Where is the bottleneck? Acceptable tradeoffs? Target metric?

Good vs Bad Questions:

Bad:  "What are your constraints?"
Good: "Should this be compatible with the existing checkpoint format?"

Bad:  "What do you want?"
Good: "Should this reward support batch computation, or single-sample is enough?"

Bad:  "Any preferences?"
Good: "Raise exception on error, or return default value?"

Rules:

  • Ask max 2-3 questions at a time
  • Only ask what affects implementation decisions
  • If user already provided info, don't ask again
  • When confident enough to proceed, proceed

Read the full file on GitHub · 180 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 180 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 6dd834194089

Subscribe to this mod's changes

planner is an agent published in the GitHub repository areal-project/AReaL (5,706 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 1,127 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other agents, from other repositories