Planning and Work Logs¶
For nontrivial work (moderate or high risk per
task-classification-and-routing.md), an agent creates a
work plan in work/active/ before making changes.
What a work plan contains¶
- Objective — what the task is trying to achieve, in one or two sentences.
- Scope — what is included.
- Out of scope — what is explicitly not included, to prevent scope creep.
- Applicable authority — which company/venture policies, standards, or specifications govern this work (see context-loading-order.md).
- Files expected to change — a concrete list, kept up to date as work proceeds.
- Assumptions — working assumptions made, cross-referenced to docs/governance/assumptions-register.md if company-level, or noted locally if task-specific.
- Risks — what could go wrong, referencing docs/governance/risk-register.md where applicable.
- Validation plan — how the work will be checked before being called done (see validation-requirements.md).
- Progress checklist — a running checklist updated as the task proceeds.
- Decisions required — anything that needs human input before the task can be considered finished.
- Handoff notes — state for whoever picks this up next, human or agent (see change-and-handoff-protocol.md).
A reusable starting structure for this is expected at work/templates/task-plan.md (maintained
alongside work-management tooling, not duplicated here).
Completion¶
When a plan's work is complete:
- Archive to
work/archive/if the plan has durable value as a historical record of what was done and why. - Delete it if it was purely a temporary working document with no lasting value once the work is merged/complete.
Do not leave stale plans sitting in work/active/ — an active plan implies work is still in
progress. If work stalls, either update the plan to reflect current status or move it out of
active/.
Progress updates without log spam¶
Provide progress updates during long-running tasks so a human can follow along, but do not fill the repository with conversational logs. A work plan's progress checklist and handoff notes are the durable record; a stream of chat-style status messages is not something that belongs committed to the repository.