09 DECOMPOSE

Milestone Planning

Parallel exploration grounds a draft milestone DAG; rounds of adversarial critics attack the draft until only a surviving DAG is locked.

01 ▸ Workflow Position

User Request (Complex) │ ▼ ┌─────────────────────────────┐ │ Clarification (10-15 points)│ └──────────────┬──────────────┘ │ ▼ ┌─────────────────────────────┐ │ Milestone Planning (ACTIVE)│ │ Explore → Draft → Critique │ └──────────────┬──────────────┘ │ ▼ ┌─────────────────────────────┐ │ Long Run │ │ Per-Milestone Execution │ └─────────────────────────────┘

02 ▸ When to use?

Used when Clarification results in a Complex (10-15 points) verdict, or when a large-scale task spanning multiple days is required.
Key Triggers
  • When "divide into milestones" or "ultraplan" commands are used
  • When the Long Run harness requests milestone decomposition
  • When the task exceeds the scope of a one-time plan (plan-crafting)

03 ▸ How it works?

Core Principle: Draft first. Exploration evidence grounds a draft DAG; information-isolated critics (Hidden Complexity, Dependency & Ordering, Verifiability, Integration & Risk) attack it in rounds until a round yields zero new Blocking findings.
Execution Steps
  1. Problem Framing + Broad Exploration: Parallel Explore agents (architecture, dependencies, verification landscape, conventions) feed the Problem Brief.
  2. Draft Decomposition: Compare two skeletons (interface-first vs risk-first) and compose DRAFT v1 — counters anchoring.
  3. Critic Rounds: Launch critics in parallel (preventing cross-contamination); each finding gets a Structural/Blocking/Concern/Nit severity.
  4. Revision Loop: Log every critique verbatim, accept (revise draft) or rebut with evidence — until a round yields zero new Blocking findings (max 3 rounds).
  5. DAG Validation + Integration Milestone: Verify cycles and file conflicts, then automatically append the final integration verification milestone.

04 ▸ Milestone Count Guard

A count of 3~7 milestones is recommended. A warning is displayed if it exceeds 7, and project splitting should be considered if it exceeds 10.

05 ▸ Hard Gates

  • Explore before drafting — a milestone boundary without evidence is a guess.
  • All critics run in parallel with information isolation (they cannot see each other's critiques).
  • Every critique is logged verbatim and resolved explicitly (accepted, or rebutted with evidence).
  • Every milestone must have binary-decidable success criteria (answerable yes/no).
  • Dependency structure must be a DAG (no cycles).

06 ▸ Related Skills

Clarification Long Run ← Back to Home