Writing Plans

This is the skill you reach for when you have requirements or a spec and need to create a detailed implementation plan before writing code. It generates comprehensive, TDD-focused plans broken into 2-5 minute tasks with exact file paths, complete code snippets, test commands, and commit messages. The format assumes whoever executes the plan has zero context about your codebase, so everything is spelled out explicitly. Plans get saved to a docs/plans directory and you can either execute them in the same session using subagents or hand them off to a fresh Claude session. The granularity is aggressive, treating "write the test", "run the test", and "commit" as separate steps, which feels tedious but actually works well for complex features.

skills.sh installs: 408
GitHub stars: 33.2K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add davila7/claude-code-templates --skill writing-plans --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Writing Plans

Overview

Write comprehensive implementation plans assuming the engineer has zero context for our codebase and questionable taste. Document everything they need to know: which files to touch for each task, code, testing, docs they might need to check, how to test it. Give them the whole plan as bite-sized tasks. DRY. YAGNI. TDD. Frequent commits.

Assume they are a skilled developer, but know almost nothing about our toolset or problem domain. Assume they don't know good test design very well.

Announce at start: "I'm using the writing-plans skill to create the implementation plan."

Context: This should be run in a dedicated worktree (created by brainstorming skill).

Save plans to: docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<feature-name>.md