implementation-planning

implementation-planning is a skill for Claude Code from neuromechanist/research-skills. It costs 82 tokens per session (1,552 once invoked), scanned A, original, BSD-3-Clause.

A method for writing clear, checkable implementation plans before making complex software changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan multi-file changes, architectural decisions, experiments, feature work, or strategic changes before coding.
Why use it?
It fixes the intended design and success checks in advance, reducing rework and preventing another developer from having to infer the approach.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Codex.

Part of the project plugin — 15 skills, 5 commands, 3 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to plan multi-file changes, architectural decisions, experiments, feature work, or strategic changes before coding.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/implementation-planning
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 neuromechanist/research-skills --skill implementation-planning
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/neuromechanist/research-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install project, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 skills, 5 commands, 3 agents.

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 implementation-planning

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/implementation-planning/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/implementation-planning)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/implementation-planning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/implementation-planning/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for implementation-planning

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/implementation-planning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/implementation-planning.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 82 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,552 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00082 $0.01552
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00776
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00310
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00155

Measured 11d ago against content hash 3c2d8e134aaf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

implementation-planning 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 11d 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.

plugins/project/skills/implementation-planning/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Implementation Planning

Plans that a different (or weaker) model could execute without re-deriving your reasoning, with success criteria fixed before any result is seen.

Model handoff

Use the strongest available model for problem framing, macro architecture, irreversible decisions, and plan approval. In Codex this is Sol; in Claude it is Fable when available, otherwise Opus. After the architecture is approved, a bounded phase planner may expand it on the intermediate tier (Codex Terra; Claude Sonnet when no design choice remains). Write the resulting brief so a clear-task worker (Codex Luna or Claude Sonnet) can implement it without reconstructing design intent. See agent-fanout for the full routing and escalation policy.

Pick the register (by stakes, not size)

Situation Register
Hard to reverse after shipping; touches privacy, auth, what data leaves the device, or public contracts; strategic pivot Heavyweight: full plan document, user approval gate before executing (plan mode where available).
Known engineering backlog; the work is clear, there is just a lot of it Lightweight: tracked issues carrying the full spec (template below); no separate plan document.
Single ordinary change No formal plan; the engineering-loop skill's step order is the plan.

The dividing line is reversibility and blast radius, not effort. A large backlog of clear fixes needs no plan document; a small change to what an external partner receives does.

Heavyweight plan: required sections

# Plan: <title> (issue #N)
## Context
[The evidence forcing this work, with numbers. What the previous phase or
investigation proved.]
## What already exists to reuse (do not rebuild)
[Named files/functions. Every plan must check this before proposing new code.]
## Approach
[The design, and one paragraph on why this and not the leading alternative.]
## Files
[New and modified, explicit paths.]
## Decision gate (set BEFORE looking at results)
[Crisp pass/fail: "X ships as default if metric A >= threshold on every
case AND metric B does not regress; if it fails, honest conclusion + named
fallback. No adoption of a non-passing candidate."]
## Prerequisites (user actions)
[Only the human can do these: account registrations, credentials, hardware.]
## Agent budget
[How many subagents this plan will spawn, worst case; see agent-fanout cap.]
## Open judgment calls
[Every ambiguity you resolved unilaterally, as a flagged list the reviewer
can veto. Silence on ambiguity is a defect.]
## Verification
[How each deliverable is proven: commands, thresholds, who runs them. For a
behavior-preserving refactor, the FIRST deliverable is the pin/
characterization test captured against the original code, per the
engineering-loop skill.]

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 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. 11d ago First seen · 134 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A 3c2d8e134aaf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

implementation-planning is a skill published in the GitHub repository neuromechanist/research-skills (45 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed BSD-3-Clause. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 1,552 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.