planning-and-task-breakdown

planning-and-task-breakdown is a skill for Claude Code from douglance/sdlc-plugin. It costs 29 tokens per session (1,875 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning guide for turning an accepted software specification into ordered milestones, tasks, and small commits. A vertical slice is a small change that runs through all needed parts of the system.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define implementation order, acceptance checks, atomic commits, and safe boundaries for parallel work.
Why use it?
It makes large or unclear work easier to start, review, hand off, and divide between people or coding agents.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Part of the sdlc plugin — 30 skills, 1 plugin shipped together

Good fit Use it to define implementation order, acceptance checks, atomic commits, and safe…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/douglance/sdlc-plugin/planning-and-task-breakdown
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.

Any agent
npx skills add douglance/sdlc-plugin --skill planning-and-task-breakdown
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/douglance/sdlc-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install sdlc, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 30 skills, 1 plugin.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for planning-and-task-breakdown

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/douglance/sdlc-plugin/planning-and-task-breakdown.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/douglance/sdlc-plugin/planning-and-task-breakdown)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/douglance/sdlc-plugin/planning-and-task-breakdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/douglance/sdlc-plugin/planning-and-task-breakdown.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,875 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00029 $0.01875
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00937
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00375
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00187

Measured 6d ago against content hash 6eb204885cc1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

planning-and-task-breakdown 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 6d ago.

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.

.agents/skills/planning-and-task-breakdown/SKILL.md · 228 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 228 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Planning and Task Breakdown

Write the plan and its handoff with lifecycle-documentation.

When to Use

  • You have a spec and need to break it into implementable units
  • A task feels too large or vague to start
  • Work needs to be parallelized across multiple agents or sessions
  • You need to communicate scope to a human
  • The implementation order isn't obvious

When NOT to use: Single-file changes with obvious scope, or when the spec already contains well-defined tasks.

Planning hierarchy

Plan
└── Milestone: a checkpoint outcome
    └── Task: an implementable vertical slice with acceptance criteria
        └── Commit: an atomic, revertable logical change

A milestone contains one or more ordered tasks. A task contains one or more ordered commits. Planning names affected areas and required verification outcomes; design adds exact future file paths, signatures, and commands.

The Planning Process

Step 1: Enter Plan Mode

Before writing any code, operate in read-only mode:

  • Read the spec and relevant codebase sections
  • Identify existing patterns and conventions, citing the exact path:line evidence
  • Find the closest implemented analogue and state what is reusable and what differs
  • Map dependencies between components
  • Note risks and unknowns

Record the searches used when no relevant prior art exists. Never use “the codebase does X” or “follow the existing pattern” without a concrete citation.

Do NOT write code during planning. The output is a plan document, not implementation.

Step 2: Identify the Dependency Graph

Map what depends on what:

Database schema
    │
    ├── API models/types
    │       │
    │       ├── API endpoints
    │       │       │
    │       │       └── Frontend API client
    │       │               │
    │       │               └── UI components
    │       │
    │       └── Validation logic
    │
    └── Seed data / migrations

Implementation order follows the dependency graph bottom-up: build foundations first.

Read the full file on GitHub · 228 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. 6d ago First seen · 228 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 6eb204885cc1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

planning-and-task-breakdown is a skill published in the GitHub repository douglance/sdlc-plugin (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 1,875 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 2026-08-31.