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Planning with Files

Manus-style persistent planning that keeps task_plan.md, findings.md and progress.md on disk so multi-step work survives compaction and /clear.

AutomationIntermediate★ 26,060⑂ 2,177AI score 8/10Last updated: Aug 9, 2026

What it does

Treats the context window as volatile RAM and the filesystem as durable disk. Before any complex task, the agent must create and continuously maintain three markdown files in your project root:

  • task_plan.md — phases, status, key decisions
  • findings.md — research and discoveries
  • progress.md — session log and test results

It ships hooks for UserPromptSubmit, PreToolUse, PostToolUse, Stop and PreCompact that re-inject the current plan, nudge you to log progress after writes, and run session-catchup.py to recover state after /clear. It also encodes a 3-strike error protocol, the 2-action rule (save findings after every two view/search operations), a read-vs-write decision matrix, a 5-question reboot test, and an anti-pattern table.

Who it's for

  • Developers running long refactors or migrations spanning dozens of tool calls
  • Anyone who has lost the thread after context compaction or /clear
  • Researchers who want discoveries and error history captured systematically
  • Teams switching between Cursor and Claude Code on the same plan files

Examples

  1. Large refactor: ask to migrate a repo to TypeScript — the agent writes a 5–7 phase task_plan.md, flips each phase to complete, and accumulates build failures in an error table.
  2. Technology research: comparing libraries, it flushes a summary to findings.md every two searches so the comparison table survives compaction.
  3. Session recovery: next morning, run the catchup script plus git diff --stat, refresh the planning files, then resume at the exact unfinished phase.

· · · Install guide · · ·

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)
  1. Download the ZIP with the button below.
  2. In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
  3. Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.
↓ Download ZIP
Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on Claude Skill Mart.
Copy the .cursor/skills/planning-with-files folder from the GitHub repo OthmanAdi/planning-with-files into my ~/.claude/skills/othmanadi-planning-with-files-4/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/OthmanAdi/planning-with-files.git /tmp/pwf && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/pwf/.cursor/skills/planning-with-files ~/.claude/skills/

⚠ This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

  1. Open a terminal and clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/OthmanAdi/planning-with-files.git /tmp/pwf
  2. Create the skills folder: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills (use ~/.cursor/skills for Cursor)
  3. Copy the skill: cp -r /tmp/pwf/.cursor/skills/planning-with-files ~/.claude/skills/
  4. Make the helper scripts executable: chmod +x ~/.claude/skills/planning-with-files/scripts/*.sh
  5. Skim the hook commands and the files under scripts/ once — they run automatically on prompts and tool calls.
  6. Restart Claude Code, open a project, and ask it to "plan this out step by step" to confirm task_plan.md is created in your project root.
  7. If you installed to a non-standard path, set the PWF_SCRIPT_DIR environment variable to the skill's scripts directory.
View source on GitHub ↗License: MIT