A structured planning guide for features, bug fixes, refactors, or new systems. It uses phases and checkpoints, and reads project knowledge stored inside the repository.

Use it to investigate a change, define its work phases, record decisions, and prepare tasks for implementation.

It turns a broad coding task into an ordered plan before implementation begins, reducing missed steps and confusion about project context.

plan — Skill for Claude Code by jameslowman

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 jameslowman/planning-with-james --skill plan

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jameslowman/planning-with-james

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install planning-with-james, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 2 hooks.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/plan.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/plan)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/plan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/plan.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 21 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 19,052 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00021	$0.19052
Opus 5	$0.00010	$0.09526
Sonnet 5	$0.00004	$0.03810
Haiku 4.5	$0.00002	$0.01905

Measured 7d ago against content hash 50c2366903df, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

plan 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 7d 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.

skills/plan/SKILL.md · 2,265 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 2,265 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Plan a Feature

NON-NEGOTIABLE: ALL PATHS ARE RELATIVE TO THE REPO ROOT All .claude/planning-with-james/ paths in this skill are relative to the current working directory (the repo you're working in), NOT ~/.claude/. The knowledge graph and plans live inside the project, not in your home directory. If you're unsure, run pwd to confirm you're in the repo root.

NON-NEGOTIABLE: ASK FIRST, WORK LATER Your FIRST action must be to ask the user what they want to do. Do NOT read files, check registries, update knowledge, or do any work before asking. The user invoked /plan because they want to start planning with you.

NON-NEGOTIABLE: AGENT PERMISSIONS ALL agents you spawn (Task tool) MUST include mode: "bypassPermissions". Background agents that hit permission prompts will have their Write/Edit calls silently denied — they burn through turns doing research but never write output files. The orchestrator then polls for result files that will never exist. This destroys all agent work. Always include this parameter on every agent spawn, background or foreground.

NON-NEGOTIABLE: THIS SKILL ONLY READS THE KNOWLEDGE GRAPH, NEVER UPDATES IT If the knowledge graph is missing or stale, inform the user and suggest they run /planning-with-james:create-knowledge or /planning-with-james:update-knowledge. Do NOT run those skills yourself.

This skill guides you through a structured planning process with multiple phases and checkpoints. It produces a comprehensive plan that can survive context loss and guide implementation.

MANDATORY: Knowledge Graph Before Source Code

This codebase has a knowledge graph that already contains module boundaries, key files, public interfaces, internal patterns, cross-module dependencies, and documented gotchas. Starting from source code means wasting time rediscovering information that is already written down.

YOU MUST read the knowledge graph before using Glob, Grep, or Read on any source file:

Read .claude/planning-with-james/knowledge/_overview.md
Read .claude/planning-with-james/knowledge/_graph.json
Read .claude/planning-with-james/knowledge/modules/{relevant}/_index.md for each area you're investigating
ONLY THEN explore source code to fill specific gaps

Read the full file on GitHub · 2,265 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.

7d ago First seen · 2,265 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 50c2366903df

Subscribe to this mod's changes

plan is a skill published in the GitHub repository jameslowman/planning-with-james (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 19,052 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.

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