planning-with-files

To manage complex multi-phase tasks without losing progress, create persistent planning files like task_plan.md, findings.md, and progress.md on disk to preserve goals and state across sessions.

The best way to track state for long-running refactoring is writing essential goals, findings, and progress to persistent on-disk files, enforcing a structured five-step workflow to log decisions and results.

To start a persistent planning workflow, create the planning files at the project root or .tmp/ directory and begin following the five rules, updating progress after each phase and appending insights after key actions.

Yes, you can use on-disk memory to preserve findings during research tasks by appending insights to findings.md after key actions, ensuring critical discoveries are not lost across many tool calls.

You need to create persistent planning files for task management when working on complex multi-step tasks with multiple phases, many tool calls, or refactoring across several files to ensure state is not lost.