Agnostic Planning Skills

Agnostic Planning Skills turns AI coding assistants into disciplined product collaborators.

Internal planning workflow for consulting engagements, open-sourced. These skills are used by the maintainer for structured project discovery and PRD workflows. They are not a standalone product.

It is a curated library of 12 language-agnostic planning skills and 4 personas that teach AI tools how to write and review PRDs, break down features into TDD tasks, estimate effort, identify risks, prioritize backlogs, plan sprints, run retrospectives, generate status reports, clarify requirements, manage GitHub issues, and create tracker-ready tickets — regardless of tech stack.

The project is built around one non-negotiable rule:

No implementation without an approved PRD. The PRD is the single source of truth for scope.

That planning gate is encoded directly into the skills and personas, so they do not just produce plausible plans. They follow a repeatable product management process.

Part of the AI Skill Ecosystem

This repo is one of 6 in a composable AI skill ecosystem:

See the Ecosystem Overview for the full architecture.

Supported agent environments

Who This Is For

What Is In The Repository

The skills are not long-form tutorials. They are executable instructions for AI agents: when to draft a PRD, when to stop for approval, how to break down a feature into TDD tasks, and how to classify and sequence tickets.

Start Here

Agnostic Planning Skills can be invoked through chat commands:

MCP support is planned but not yet implemented. Currently, skills are invoked via chat commands (@skill-name in Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI) or installed via gh skill install.

Read the complete guide on Calling Skills and Personas for syntax examples and when to use each method.

The Planning Pipeline

graph LR
    A[create-prd] -->|PRD approved| B[generate-tasks]
    B --> C[plan-tickets]
    A -->|Direct to tickets| C

For a new feature from scratch

create-prd -> [gate: PRD approved] -> generate-tasks -> plan-tickets

The full product-owner persona lifecycle

graph TD
    A[Feature Idea] --> B["Phase 1<br/>Discovery & Clarification"]
    B --> C["Phase 2<br/>PRD Draft"]
    C --> D{"PRD Approved?"}
    D -->|No| E["Phase 3<br/>Review & Revise"]
    E --> C
    D -->|Yes| F["Phase 4<br/>Task Estimation"]
    F --> G["Phase 5<br/>Ticket Generation"]
    G --> H{"Tickets Approved?"}
    H -->|No| G
    H -->|Yes| I["Phase 6<br/>Sprint Placement"]
    I --> J{"Sprint Confirmed?"}
    J -->|No| I
    J -->|Yes| K[Ready for Development]

Skill Catalog

Persona

See docs/reference/skill-catalog.md for the complete catalog and docs/reference/integration-matrix.md for skill chaining.

How Skills Work

Each skill is a single SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and a 6-section body:

1. Frontmatter (YAML)       — name, description, metadata
2. Quick Reference          — scannable table for fast lookup
3. HARD-GATE               — non-negotiable blocking rules
4. Core Process             — step-by-step procedure
5. Output Style             — exact shape of artifacts
6. Integration              — predecessor/successor skills

The product-owner persona chains skills with additional phases, hard gates, decision gates, and error recovery.

Language-Agnostic by Design

This repository is designed to work with any tech stack. Skills auto-detect project conventions:

• Test command: Inspects package.json, Gemfile, Cargo.toml, Makefile, or pyproject.toml — falls back to asking the user.
• Source directory: Detects src/, lib/, app/, or asks the user.
• Test directory: Detects __tests__/, spec/, test/, tests/, or mirror convention.
• Documentation tool: Detects JSDoc, YARD, Sphinx, rustdoc, etc.

Install Selected Skills With GitHub CLI

Requires GitHub CLI v2.90.0+ with gh skill.

# Install all skills interactively
gh skill install igmarin/agnostic-planning-skills

# Install a specific skill for the current project
gh skill install igmarin/agnostic-planning-skills create-prd --scope project

# Install a specific skill globally
gh skill install igmarin/agnostic-planning-skills create-prd --scope user

Install With skills.sh

Requires skills.sh CLI.

[!NOTE] The root SKILL.md is the catalog orchestrator (not a standalone skill). The --full-depth flag ensures discovery of all nested skills under skills/<category>/<name>/.

Project-Level Installation (Local)

To install skills for your current project workspace:

# Install ALL skills and personas
npx skills add igmarin/agnostic-planning-skills --full-depth --all

# Install a specific skill (e.g., create-prd)
npx skills add igmarin/agnostic-planning-skills@create-prd --full-depth

Global Installation

To install skills globally for your AI coding assistant:

# Install ALL skills and personas globally
npx skills add igmarin/agnostic-planning-skills --full-depth --all --global

# Install a specific skill globally (e.g., create-prd)
npx skills add igmarin/agnostic-planning-skills@create-prd --full-depth --global

Documentation Map

Contributing

When contributing skills, personas, or docs:

• Please follow the Code of Conduct in all interactions.
• Check out the Contributing Guide for details on our development and pull request processes.
• Keep generated artifacts in English unless a user explicitly asks for another language.
• Preserve the PRD-gates-task-generation rule for every planning skill.
• Keep public docs consistent with directory.json and the latest release.