plan-mode

plan-mode is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from vercel-labs/open-agents. It costs 60 tokens per session (1,426 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning guide for non-trivial software changes, covering architecture, data flow, ownership, lifecycle, failures, and future maintenance.

In plain words
What is it for?
Planning new features, architectural decisions, multi-file changes, and tasks with unclear requirements or several possible approaches.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of making a local fix that conflicts with the rest of the system or creates hidden follow-up work.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

About the project

Open Agents is an open-source reference application for running background coding agents through a web interface, durable workflows, isolated Vercel sandboxes, and GitHub integration. Developers fork and adapt it to let agents make code changes without keeping a local computer running. The catalogue entries provide skills, agents, and instructions for its workflow.

vercel-labs/open-agents · 5,802 stars · on GitHub

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 skills/vercel-labs/open-agents/plan-mode
Any agent
npx skills add vercel-labs/open-agents --skill plan-mode
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vercel-labs/open-agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 plan-mode

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vercel-labs/open-agents/plan-mode.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vercel-labs/open-agents/plan-mode)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vercel-labs/open-agents/plan-mode"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vercel-labs/open-agents/plan-mode.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,426 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 $0.00060 $0.01426
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00713
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00285
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00143

Measured 4d ago against content hash aa0ac4bab69a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

plan-mode 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 4d 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/plan-mode/SKILL.md · 113 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 113 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

For non-trivial implementation tasks, plan before you code. Treat every change as a system change, not an isolated patch. Your job is not just to find a working implementation; it is to find the smallest implementation that remains coherent with the architecture, lifecycle, and future evolution of the system.

Planning Doctrine

  • Think broadly, implement narrowly. Analyze the surrounding system before deciding where the change belongs.
  • Every change has system implications. Consider how the request affects data flow, ownership of state, interfaces, lifecycle, failure modes, observability, and future extension.
  • Prefer authoritative, derivable designs. If UI state or control flow can be derived from backend events, persisted state, shared protocols, or existing abstractions, prefer that over inventing transient client-only state.
  • Choose the smallest coherent solution. Do not default to the smallest local patch if it distorts the architecture or adds hidden follow-on complexity.
  • Expand scope only when it simplifies the system. Widen the implementation only when a local fix would create duplicated state, fragile coupling, lifecycle mismatches, or recurring complexity.
  • Do not gold-plate. Make bounded architectural improvements that materially improve coherence for the task at hand.

Plan File

Write your plan to a PLAN.md file in the project root. Build this file incrementally as you progress through the steps below -- do not wait until the end to write it all at once. If a plan file already exists, read it first and decide whether the current request is a new task (overwrite) or a continuation (revise).

Step 1: Explore

Thoroughly explore the codebase to understand the request before designing anything.

  • Read the relevant files and understand existing patterns, architecture, and conventions.
  • Trace the end-to-end flow, not just the local implementation point.
  • Identify the current source of truth, state ownership, boundaries between subsystems, and any existing invariants.
  • Identify the full lifecycle of the behavior: trigger, processing, intermediate states, completion, side effects, failure, retry, and cleanup.
  • Search for similar features and prior art in the codebase.
  • Launch parallel explorations when the scope is uncertain or multiple areas of the codebase are involved. Give each exploration a specific, distinct search focus (e.g., one searches for existing implementations of similar features, another explores related components, a third investigates testing patterns). Use a single agent when the task is isolated to known files or the user provided specific file paths.
  • Do not start implementing yet.

Read the full file on GitHub · 113 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. 4d ago First seen · 113 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A aa0ac4bab69a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

plan-mode is a skill published in the GitHub repository vercel-labs/open-agents (5,802 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 1,426 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories