What problem does it solve?
Unstructured development workflows often lead to stakeholder misalignment, rework from missed requirements, and scope creep due to lack of clear checkpoints. This Skill eliminates those issues by enforcing a structured, phased process with mandatory approval gates to catch problems early before they propagate to later stages.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Phased approval-gated workflow: Breaks development work into 5 core phases (task clarification → research → planning → todo list → implementation → verification), with explicit user approval required to proceed past research, planning, and todo list stages to ensure alignment.
- Built-in review and rollback protocols: Includes structured review-revision cycles for each phase's deliverables, with clear rules to roll back to the earliest invalid phase if upstream approved artifacts have defects, avoiding patchwork fixes that introduce new issues.
- Adaptable workflow variants: Supports both a full workflow for high-stakes, high-uncertainty tasks (e.g., cross-module feature work) and a streamlined variant for narrow, well-understood tasks to match effort to task complexity.
- Use Case: For a cross-team user authentication feature implementation, use this Skill to align stakeholders on requirements, validate existing codebase constraints, lock in a detailed implementation plan before coding, track progress via a checked todo list, and verify final implementation matches the approved plan exactly.
Quick Start
Use the research-plan-driven skill to implement the new user notification feature we discussed, starting with task clarification to align on requirements, success criteria, and non-goals.
