Auto Review Plan Skill | Agent Skills

Auto Review Plan

Loop: review-plan → auto-apply safe plan edits, repeat until convergence or escalation. Collects structural recommendations into a single end-of-run approval bucket so the user isn't prompted per-finding.

This skill is the plan-side analog of auto-review-code. It tightens a plan before implementation starts, rather than cleaning code after.

When to use

User says "auto-review-plan", "auto-fix the plan", "tighten the plan", or similar
User wants to stop manually re-running review-plan after each round of edits
Hardening an IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN_*.md, REFACTOR_PLAN_*.md, or an in-conversation plan-mode draft before starting work

When NOT to use

Single-shot plan critique only — use review-plan directly
Reviewing code rather than a plan — use auto-review-code or review-code
Creating a plan from scratch — use plan-implementation or plan-refactor

Target plan

The skill supports two targets — pick whichever matches the source. The loop is identical; only the "where the edits live" step differs.

File-based plan (preferred)

Order of preference:

User-supplied path. If the user pointed at a specific file, use it.
Plan file at repo root. IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN_<feature>.md or REFACTOR_PLAN_<feature>.md. If exactly one matches, use it. If multiple match and the user didn't name one, ask which.

Edits are applied with the Edit tool against the file, then the file is re-read for the next round.

In-conversation plan (plan-mode draft or inline message)

If no plan file exists but the assistant recently drafted a plan via ExitPlanMode or inline in a message, use that text as the target.

There is no file to edit — hold the working plan text in conversation state. Each round:

Pass the current plan text to review-plan (inline, as the skill already supports).
Produce a new full plan text with the auto-apply edits merged in. This replaces the prior working version.
Feed that new text into the next round.

At exit, emit the final revised plan text as part of the user summary so the user can paste it back into plan mode (or accept it as the working plan). Do not persist the in-conversation plan to a file unless the user asks.

If neither a file nor a recent in-conversation plan exists, stop and tell the user to create one first (via plan-implementation or plan-refactor), or to paste/point at one. Do not invent a plan.

Auto-apply policy

A finding is auto-applied without prompting when ALL of these hold:

Finding comes from the Blocking concerns or Recommended plan edits section of the review-plan output. Worth considering and Long-term watch-outs are advisory — add them to the flagged bucket rather than the plan.
Fix is concrete — either a specific replacement ("change the phase 2 rollout step from X to Y") or an anchored insertion ("add an error-state bullet under phase 3"). Vague asks like "think harder about scale" are NOT concrete.
Fix is localized — touches one section or phase of the plan AND ≤~40 lines of plan text.
Fix does NOT require new dependencies, services, packages, or external systems beyond what the plan already names.
Fix does NOT rewrite the problem statement, goal, success criteria, or scope boundary.
Fix does NOT delete, merge, split, or reorder existing phases. Adding a single new phase AT THE END (e.g., a cleanup phase) is fine; structural reshuffling is not.
Fix does NOT change the plan's verdict category itself (e.g., a finding that amounts to "reconsider whether this is the right approach" escalates — see below).

Otherwise: add to the flagged-for-approval bucket and continue the loop. Over-flagging is cheap; over-applying is expensive. When in doubt, flag. Plans are cheaper to re-review than to re-litigate, so err toward the user.

When you flag a finding, capture the dossier now while the context is fresh — don't defer it to summary time. For each flagged item, record:

Proposal — exactly one concrete change in plain language; state the precise before → after (e.g., "rename the Goals heading to Outcomes"). Never frame it as "either A or B" — pick one direction. Before flagging a binary, check whether the binary is false: many "A vs B" framings collapse into "A for cases X, B for cases Y" when examined (e.g., "render 0 everywhere" vs "render — everywhere" → "render 0 for true zeros, — for ambiguous zeros"). If a hybrid or selective option is stronger, propose that. The user reads Proposal first; if it's ambiguous or implicitly forces a false choice, the pros/cons that follow are disorienting.
What the user sees — required for UI / copy / dashboard / customer-facing changes; optional for backend-only changes. Show before/after exactly as the reader will encounter it (rendered text, ASCII tables for tabular UI, side-by-side comparison). For copy/label decisions, separate what gets rendered from what the reader thinks — both matter, and they are not the same. Example: a column labeled PRs Blocked: 7 renders as the literal number, but reads as a strict promise ("this job blocked 7 PRs from merging"); a Flaky PRs: 7 label renders identically but reads as a softer claim.
Pros if applied — concrete benefits, each with at least one example (actual phase, actual scenario, actual downstream effect). The lens is the world after the proposal lands.
Cons if applied — concrete costs/risks, each anchored to a specific failure scenario: what goes wrong, who notices, what it looks like. Stories beat abstract risk lists. Weak: "this might confuse the team." Strong: "the migration engineer reads Status: blocked in the tracker, assumes a hard dependency, blocks their PR for two days waiting on a human who isn't actually needed."
Recommendation — pick exactly one form:
- apply (confidence: high|medium) — one-line reason. Use when you'd defend the call.
- skip (confidence: high|medium) — one-line reason. Same bar.
- apply if <condition>, else skip (confidence: high|medium) — name the condition that flips the call (e.g., "apply if exec/leadership viewers will read this dashboard, else skip — non-engineers read 'Blocked' too literally"). Use when the right call depends on context the user knows and you don't (audience, scope, sequencing).
- no strong opinion — depends on <the open question>. Use when the input itself doesn't exist yet (e.g., a target the PM hasn't set). Naming the question is the work — it's what unblocks the user. Do not fabricate a recommendation to look decisive.

Hedge prose like "Consider…", "Worth thinking about…", or "May be acceptable" is not a recommendation — convert it into one of the four forms above before flagging.

To apply — the concrete next action the user takes to accept this finding (e.g., "get the target from the PM, then re-run /auto-review-plan"). This is what turns a flagged item from informative into actionable; the worked examples in the final summary all end with it.

Hard-stop on "Rethink approach"

If review-plan returns a verdict of Rethink approach, stop the loop immediately. Do not auto-apply anything from that round. Show the full review to the user and wait for direction. "Rethink" means the plan has a problem that tactical edits won't fix — it deserves a thinking pass, not a reflex edit.

Loop structure

For each round (cap at 3):

Review phase. Invoke the review-plan skill against the target plan (file path for file-based runs, inline text for in-conversation runs). Capture all findings with fingerprints (see below) and the returned verdict.
Check verdict. If verdict is Rethink approach, hard-stop and exit to the user.
Triage findings. For each finding, classify as: auto-apply or flag-for-approval per the policy above. For each flag-for-approval finding, build the What / Pros / Cons / Recommendation dossier per the Auto-apply policy section before continuing — do not defer it to summary time.
Check oscillation. For each auto-apply candidate, check if the same fingerprint was already auto-applied in a previous round. If yes, move it to flag-for-approval with a note ("oscillation: applied in round N, re-flagged in round M") — do not apply again. If the same fingerprint oscillates twice, exit the loop immediately.
Apply plan edits.
- File-based: edit the plan file in place. Use Edit with narrow old_string / new_string anchored to the finding's section so unrelated text isn't disturbed. After each edit, re-read the plan file to confirm the change landed.
- In-conversation: produce a revised full plan text that merges the auto-apply edits into the prior working version. Keep the revised text in conversation state as the canonical plan for the next round. Do not re-emit it to the user between rounds.
Log the round to .claude/auto-review-plan-log.md (see format below).
Check exit conditions.

Exit conditions

Stop when any of these hit:

Convergence — A full round produced zero auto-applied edits (either no blocking findings, or all blocking findings were flagged). This is the normal success exit.
Max rounds — 3 rounds completed. Note the cap was hit; may indicate the plan needs a human pass before iterating further.
Rethink verdict — Hard-stop, exit to user.
Oscillation (twice) — Same fingerprint flipped in and out across rounds. Exit with the log attached.
Edit failure loop — If three consecutive edit attempts fail to land (file-based: old_string no longer matches after drift; in-conversation: revised text loses a section the next round's fingerprints refer to), stop and escalate with the current log.

Fingerprint format

Normalize each finding to a stable fingerprint so oscillation detection is reliable across rounds:

{plan_id}:{section_or_phase}|{category}|{short_summary_slug}

plan_id: the plan file path for file-based targets, or a stable tag like plan-mode-draft (or a short slug derived from the plan's title heading) for in-conversation targets.
section_or_phase: the section header or phase label the finding targets (e.g., Phase 2 — Rollout, Goals, Testing). Use the literal heading text, lowercased and trimmed.
category: one of scope, architecture, phase-ordering, missing-gate, missing-state, clarity, dependency, testing, ux
short_summary_slug: lowercase, hyphenated, ≤40 chars, derived from the finding title (e.g., missing-rollback-plan, unspecified-error-state, no-telemetry-gate)

Section names are more stable than line numbers for plans, which get re-sectioned as edits apply. Fingerprint matching for oscillation should allow for minor section-title wording drift within the same plan when the category and summary slug match.

State log format

Write to .claude/auto-review-plan-log.md at the repo root. Overwrite on each invocation (single-run file — users who want history can copy it). Ensure the parent .claude/ directory exists; create it if needed.

# Auto-review-plan log

Target: IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN_checkout-redesign.md  (or: plan-mode draft — "Checkout Redesign")
Started: 2026-04-24T10:03:12Z

## Round 1 — review-plan

Verdict: Revise before starting

- [Blocking] Phase 2 — Rollout | missing-gate | no-rollback-plan
  - action: auto-applied (added rollback step under Phase 2 — Rollout)
- [Blocking] Phase 3 — Migration | missing-state | unspecified-failure-mode
  - action: auto-applied (added failure-mode bullet under Phase 3 — Migration)
- [Blocking] Goals | scope | unclear-success-criteria
  - action: flagged (requires product-level decision on what "success" means)
- [Watch] Phase 4 — Cleanup | architecture | long-term-coupling
  - action: flagged (advisory — Worth considering)

## Round 2 — review-plan

Verdict: Ready to implement

- (no blocking findings)

## Exit: convergence (round 2)

Final summary (emit to user)

After the loop exits, emit a single user-facing summary. This is the only user-facing output during the run — no per-finding narration while looping.

Output discipline: Emit the summary as rendered markdown directly in chat — do NOT wrap your output in a code fence. The ```markdown block below is documentation showing the structure; strip the outer fence when emitting so the user sees rendered headings, bold, and inline code rather than a code-block dump. Inside the summary, emit numbered flagged items as live numbered-list markdown — do NOT wrap individual items in code fences. The only place a code fence is appropriate inside a flagged item is the What the user sees field when showing literal rendered UI (e.g., a side-by-side ASCII table — see auto-review-code Item 3 for a worked example).

## Auto-review-plan complete

**Target:** IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN_checkout-redesign.md  *(or: `plan-mode draft — "Checkout Redesign"`)*
**Rounds:** 2 (converged) | **Final verdict:** Ready to implement

**Auto-applied (2):**
- Phase 2 — Rollout: added rollback step (finding: no-rollback-plan)
- Phase 3 — Migration: added failure-mode bullet (finding: unspecified-failure-mode)

**Flagged for approval (2):**

Each item must include all six dossier fields defined in the Auto-apply policy section above (**Proposal**, **What the user sees**, **Pros if applied**, **Cons if applied**, **Recommendation**, **To apply**). Skip the optional **What the user sees** field for backend / process / scope plan changes (the two examples below); include it whenever the plan touches user-facing copy, dashboards, error messages, or any rendered output a human will read — for a worked example, see `auto-review-code` Item 3 (dashboard column rename). Don't omit fields — if pros/cons/recommendation aren't filled in, the user has to ask for them anyway. Emit each item as live numbered-list markdown, not inside a code fence.

1. **[Blocking] Clarify success criteria** — `Goals` section
   **Proposal:** Replace "users like the new checkout" in the `Goals` section with a measurable target — "checkout completion rate ≥ 92% over the 14-day rollout window, p95 latency ≤ 800ms" — and add a `## Success criteria` subsection naming the metric source (Amplitude funnel `checkout_v2`).
   **Pros if applied:**
   - Phase 3's rollout gate becomes mechanical instead of a vibe check. Example: a rollback decision today reads "if it doesn't feel right" — with the threshold it becomes "if completion drops below 92% for 24h, roll back."
   - "Is this done?" is answerable from a dashboard, so the team doesn't have to schedule a meeting to interpret the result.
   - Forces the product call *now* (cheap, before code lands) rather than mid-rollout (expensive — requires reverting a partial ship).
   **Cons if applied:**
   - Requires a product-level decision the plan author may not own — can stall the plan if the call has to bubble up to the PM. Example: if the checkout PM is on PTO this week, the plan can't move forward.
   - A wrong target locks in a misleading success signal that's hard to walk back once the rollout dashboard is built around it. Example: shipping with 92% then later learning the historical baseline was 94% turns the rollout into a regression we accidentally celebrated.
   **Recommendation:** `no strong opinion` — depends on who owns the checkout KPI. If product has a target already, paste it in. If not, the right move is a 15-minute call with the PM, not a guess from the plan.
   **To apply:** Get the target from the PM, update the `Goals` section with the metric/threshold/window, then re-run `/auto-review-plan`.

2. **[Watch] Long-term coupling risk** — `Phase 4 — Cleanup`
   **Proposal:** Add a Phase 5 that severs the legacy checkout's import of `pricing_service.v2`, replacing it with a stubbed `legacy_pricing` shim, so the legacy module can be deleted on its own deprecation timeline without dragging pricing changes with it.
   **Pros if applied:**
   - Legacy can be deleted independently — no surprise blocker when the team finally rips it out. Example: last quarter's `pricing_service.v1` deletion was held up 6 weeks by exactly this kind of dangling import.
   - Pricing-service refactors stop tripping over a module nobody uses — every future pricing change saves a "why is legacy importing this?" detour.
   **Cons if applied:**
   - Adds a phase and a shim the team has to maintain until the legacy deletion lands. Example: every pricing-service signature change for the next quarter has to update `legacy_pricing` too.
   - If legacy gets deleted within ~3 months (Q3 target per Phase 4), the shim is wasted work — built, maintained, and thrown away inside one quarter.
   **Recommendation:** `skip` (confidence: medium) — legacy checkout is on the Q3 delete list per Phase 4's note; a shim for <90 days is overkill. Track as post-launch debt instead.
   **To apply:** Add a single TODO bullet under `Phase 4 — Cleanup` referencing the coupling so it's not lost, and proceed.

**Oscillations caught:** 0
**Edit failures:** 0

Log: `.claude/auto-review-plan-log.md`

Next: resolve the flagged items above. Re-run `/auto-review-plan` if you make non-trivial edits, then hand the plan to implementation.

For in-conversation targets, append the final revised plan text under a ### Revised plan heading in the summary so the user can paste it back into plan mode or use it directly.

Invoking the sub-skill

This skill orchestrates review-plan only. For each round, invoke review-plan with the current plan (path for file-based targets, inline text for in-conversation targets — the sub-skill handles both) and apply its output per the policy above. Do not re-implement review-plan's delegation to senior-engineer and product-manager — call the skill and consume its structured output.

User override mid-run

If the user interrupts mid-round with a correction (e.g., "don't touch the Goals section", "flag everything in Phase 3, even small edits"), honor it for the remainder of the run, note it in the log, and continue.

Related skills

review-plan — the single-shot version; this skill is a loop around it
auto-review-code — the code-side analog; same loop pattern, layered on review-code (+ a code-simplifier pass)
plan-implementation / plan-refactor — create the plan this skill hardens
clarify — use before the plan is written for upfront clarification

Agent Skills: Auto Review Plan

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