Task Planning

/camel-plan — Phase 2: Task decomposition and planning

Overview

/camel-plan is the Phase 2 orchestrator that transforms the approved Design Specification into an executable Implementation Plan. Through task decomposition, dependency analysis, and wave planning, the AI creates a structured recipe for code generation.

The output is a task-by-task breakdown with acceptance criteria, component lists, and parallel execution waves.

When to Use

Invoke /camel-plan when you:

  • Have an approved Design Specification from /camel-brainstorm
  • Want to see the implementation broken into discrete tasks before code generation
  • Need to understand task dependencies and execution order

Auto-invocation: After you approve the Design Specification in /camel-brainstorm, the AI automatically invokes /camel-plan. You rarely need to invoke it manually.

Input: Design Specification

/camel-plan reads the Design Specification from .camel-kit/design-spec.md (created by /camel-brainstorm).

The planner analyzes all seven sections:

  1. Business Purpose → Understand the overall goal
  2. Integration Flows → Identify distinct implementation tasks
  3. Systems and Endpoints → Determine component requirements
  4. Data Formats → Plan transformation tasks
  5. Error Handling Strategy → Create error handling tasks
  6. Technical Requirements → Set constraints (components, performance)
  7. Observability and Configuration → Include metrics and config tasks

The Planning Process

The AI executes four steps to transform the design into an executable plan.

Summary

/camel-plan transforms Design Specifications into Implementation Plans through:

  1. Flow-to-Task Mapping - Each flow becomes one or more discrete tasks
  2. Acceptance Criteria - Clear definition of “done” for each task
  3. Component Listing - Required Camel components per task
  4. Wave Analysis - Dependency graph and parallel execution plan
  5. Two-Stage Review - Spec compliance + code quality per task
  6. Approval Gate - Explicit user approval before code generation

The Implementation Plan is the recipe for /camel-execute. It specifies what to build, not how to build it.

Next: /camel-execute to learn how code generation works.