claude-toolbox

work-plan

Plan the work, work the plan.

A set of commands for Claude Code that help you manage software projects by planning incrementally, not all upfront. Specify your goal, create a backlog, then detail only the next step you'll actually work on. As you implement and learn, adjust your plans.

Detailed plans made far in advance rarely survive contact with reality — whether you're coding yourself or working with AI. work-plan helps you maintain just enough structure to move forward while letting plans evolve as your understanding grows.

Philosophy: The Middle Path

This workflow sits between two extremes in AI-assisted development:

Spec-driven development creates comprehensive specifications upfront. By the time you reach implementation, requirements have shifted and understanding has deepened. You end up maintaining two things that drift apart: specs and code. This is expensive with human teams and wastes precious context with AI.

Vibe coding is pure improvisation with no structure. It feels productive initially but projects become chaotic without any roadmap to maintain coherent goals and architecture.

work-plan takes a different approach: maintain clear business goals and a roughly prioritized backlog, but only detail the very next item you'll implement. After completing it, groom the backlog based on what you learned, adjust priorities, then detail the next one. You always know your next couple steps clearly, plus a rough sense of direction.

This is the same insight that emerged when software teams moved from big-upfront-design approaches to iterative methods—planning incrementally based on learning works better than pretending to know everything from day one. That principle applies equally well to AI-assisted development.

Quick workflow overview

• /work-plan:specify to start a new initiative → /work-plan:create-backlog to prioritize work.
• Repeat /work-plan:prep-next to plan the next step → /work-plan:implement to execute it.
• /work-plan:one-off for small changes that don't need formal backlog planning.
• /work-plan:adjust when requirements/understanding change.
• /work-plan:groom-backlog to keep your backlog manageable.
• /work-plan:load to load initiative context for free-form discussion.

I was inspired by Advanced Context Engineering for Coding Agents.

Installation

Clone this repo, then ln -s $LOCALREPO/commands/work-plan ~/.claude/commands/work-plan.