spec-to-plan — work a converged spec forwards into a buildable plan

The skill is named spec-to-plan; the product/CLI it drives is the devague plan command group. (The prior leg — turning a vague idea into a spec — is the sibling /think skill.) It is the forward peer of the working-backwards spec engine: where /think converges on what to build, /spec-to-plan converges on how to build it.

A plan is seeded from a converged frame and tracks tasks against the spec's coverage targets. The CLI is deterministic and move-driven — you (the agent) choose the next move; the CLI tracks state and tells you what's still missing. Run devague plan learn for the method and devague plan explain <move> for any single move.

How to run

The entry point is scripts/spec-to-plan.sh. Invoke it from the repository you are speccing (plans persist under .devague/ in the current directory, alongside the frames they derive from):

bash .claude/skills/spec-to-plan/scripts/spec-to-plan.sh <move> [args...]
bash .claude/skills/spec-to-plan/scripts/spec-to-plan.sh status

It resolves the CLI portably — an installed devague on PATH (the normal case), falling back to uv run devague inside the devague checkout, else an install hint. Every move — including status — is forwarded verbatim as devague plan <move>, so you can equally call the CLI directly (devague plan <move> …).

Moves

Move	What it does
new --frame <slug>	Seed a plan from a converged frame. Derives the coverage targets (c*/h*) the plan must satisfy. Refuses an unconverged frame.
task "<summary>"	Add a task. --accept "<crit>", --dep <tN>, --covers <c*/h*> (each repeatable); --origin llm lands it proposed.
accept <tN> "<crit>"	Add an acceptance criterion to a task.
depend <tN> --on <tM>	Record that task tN depends on tM.
cover <tN> --target <c*/h*>	Mark a task as covering a coverage target.
confirm <tN> / reject <tN>	Resolve a task. User-only decision.
risk "<text>" --kind <kind>	Record a first-class plan risk (--task <tN> to attach).
converge	Evaluate the gate against the live source frame; list remaining gaps.
export	Write the buildable plan to docs/plans/ — only after converge passes.
waves	Emit deterministic dependency waves ({plan, waves}) — scheduling metadata only, not orchestration. Read-only, works on an in-progress plan; refuses a cyclic/dangling graph. Devague describes the graph; an operator decides how to run it (#20).
status	Read-only: where the plan stands + the recommended next move, re-checked against the live frame (--json too).
show / list	Render a plan / list plans (--json for raw state).
learn / explain <move>	Teach the method / explain one move.

Risk kinds (shared with the frame engine): unknown_nonblocking, unknown_blocking, out_of_scope, follow_up.

status — the next-move verb

status is a first-class, read-only CLI verb (devague plan status, internalised from this wrapper in 0.11.0 — issue #30). It composes devague plan list + devague plan converge and prints where the current plan stands, the remaining gaps, and the recommended next move derived from the first gap. Like converge/export it re-checks the live source frame (so frame drift surfaces as an error), but it never mutates state. Pass --json for the structured payload ({plan, total, ready_for_plan, blockers, warnings, parked_items, required_next_moves}).

plan: my-feature    (1 plan total)
convergence: NOT passed — 2 gap(s):
  - coverage target c5 (boundary) has no confirmed task
  - task t2 has no acceptance criteria

recommended next move (first gap):
  cover c5: devague plan task "<summary>" --covers c5 --accept "<...>"

Run it whenever you're unsure what to do next.

Hard rules (do not violate)

These are the point of the method — convergence must mean something.

• Seed from a converged spec only. plan new refuses a frame that hasn't converged. The plan's coverage targets are the spec's confirmed claims and honesty conditions — there is nothing honest to plan against until the spec converges.
• LLM proposals stay proposed. A task captured with --origin llm lands as proposed. Never confirm your own proposal. Confirmation is a user-only decision — surface the proposed task and let the user confirm or reject it.
• Cover every target; criteria on every task. The gate requires every coverage target to be covered by a confirmed task, and every confirmed task to carry at least one acceptance criterion. Don't hand-wave a task as "done-ish."
• Keep the graph honest. Dependencies must reference real tasks and form an acyclic graph; the gate rejects dangling deps and cycles.
• Park real unknowns as risks; don't paper over them. A genuinely unknown decision is an unknown_blocking risk — it holds back convergence, by design.
• Converge against the live frame. converge/export re-load the source frame every time. If the frame was deleted or has regressed below convergence, they refuse — re-converge the spec (in /think) first.

Coaching toward small, file-disjoint, TDD-gated tasks

When authoring a plan that will be built via parallel execution (fanned out to multiple agents via the downstream /assign-to-workforce skill), prefer the following discipline to maximize parallelism and minimize merge friction:

Small and crisply scoped

Each task should be small enough for a simpler or cheaper model to build test-first without re-deriving the full design. If a task spans multiple files or architectural layers, split it — narrow scope forces you to write sharp acceptance criteria and keeps waves wide.

File disjoint

Prefer tasks that touch non-overlapping files. When two same-wave tasks modify the same file, merge collision becomes inevitable. The dependency graph alone does not guarantee file disjointness — it only sequences task content dependencies; same-wave tasks with overlapping file-writes must be split across waves or given explicit dependencies.

Check devague plan waves output: if a wave is wide but all tasks touch src/core.py, the wave is formally parallel but operationally serialized at merge. Reorder task boundaries so wide waves operate on disjoint file sets.

TDD acceptance criteria on every task

Every confirmed task must carry at least one acceptance criterion, phrased as a testable condition (not a vague outcome). For example:

• Bad: "Implement the parser"
• Better: "Parser accepts a valid spec file and rejects malformed YAML without data loss"

Acceptance criteria are the contract between the main agent (who merges) and the subagent (who builds). A test suite derived from these criteria validates each task's output before merge, independent of model capability. This is not optional: devague plan converge warns (non-blocking) when a confirmed task lacks criteria.

The key invariant: parallel = serial

A plan built in parallel must yield identical results to building it serially. This is guaranteed only if:

1. Same-wave tasks have no inter-task dependencies (checked by waves).
2. Same-wave tasks touch disjoint files (you must verify; the CLI does not).
3. Each task's acceptance criteria are sharp enough that a subagent's output passes them independent of whether it was built in isolation or alongside other tasks.

The TDD gate — tests pass before and after the merge — is the main agent's proof that parallelism didn't break correctness.

How to route tasks to the workforce

Once your plan converges, devague plan waves emits the dependency-graph as scheduling metadata (ordered batches of task IDs). This feeds directly into the /assign-to-workforce skill, which:

1. Displays the plan, waves, and suggested per-task subagent/model pairing.
2. Waits for the human to approve the implementation split plan (or edit assignments).
3. Fans out approved waves to isolated subagent worktrees (one per task per wave).
4. Returns control to the main agent, which TDD-gates each merge before moving to the next wave.

Plan for workforce execution early: narrow task scope, write crisp acceptance criteria, and strive for wide waves with disjoint files.

Output contract

Results go to stdout, diagnostics and errors to stderr — a strict split you can rely on when parsing. Pass --json to any move for a structured payload. Exit code 0 on success, non-zero on user error (with a hint: line). Plans live under .devague/plans/ in the current directory; the exported plan-md lands in docs/plans/.

Worked example

Picking up after /think exported a spec for the frame my-feature:

p() { bash .claude/skills/spec-to-plan/scripts/spec-to-plan.sh "$@"; }

p new --frame my-feature        # seeds the plan + its coverage targets
p show                          # see the c*/h* targets you must cover

p task "Build the core engine" --accept "engine has a convergence gate" \
    --covers c1 --covers c3
p task "Pressure-test honesty conditions" --dep t1 --covers h1 --covers h2 \
    --accept "every honesty condition maps to a test"

# Park a genuine unknown instead of guessing:
p risk "exact rollout sequencing" --kind unknown_nonblocking

p status        # what's left + the next move
p converge      # gate; resolve any listed gaps
p export        # writes docs/plans/my-feature.md once converged

The exported plan-md is a buildable artifact: topologically ordered tasks, each with acceptance criteria and the spec targets it covers. It feeds directly into implementation (or superpowers:writing-plans).

Provenance

This is a first-party skill — its origin is agentculture/devague, where the devague agent maintains it alongside the tool it operates (dogfooding), next to its sibling /think. It is the inverse of the other skills under .claude/skills/, which devague vendors from steward. When ready, steward pulls it from devague and broadcasts it to the rest of the AgentCulture mesh. The cite, don't import policy still holds: downstream repos copy it, they don't symlink or depend on it. See docs/skill-sources.md.