Ralph Plan

Generate queue-ready planning artifacts for a Ralph-managed project without starting implementation.

Use this as the public planning entry point after requirements are understood.

In this source repository, the root runtime artifacts are dogfood examples. Installed target repos should use their own copied scaffold from src/ and generate their own runtime records after installation.

Use When

• A project PRD already exists and needs to become execution-ready.
• The user wants a numbered spec queue, spec.md, plan.md, and tasks.md artifacts without starting implementation.
• The installed harness exists and the next useful step is planning rather than execution.

Workflow

1. Read the project PRD, project policy, and any related artifacts.
2. Decompose the PRD into ordered epochs and numbered specs.
3. Produce or update .ralph/state/spec-queue.json.
4. Produce or update specs/INDEX.md.
5. Produce or update specs/<spec-id>-<slug>/spec.md.
6. Produce or update spec-local research.md artifacts when the planning batch is ready for research.
7. Produce or update specs/<spec-id>-<slug>/plan.md.
8. Produce or update specs/<spec-id>-<slug>/tasks.md when enough information exists.
9. Keep the tasks dependency-ordered and small enough for focused implementation passes.
10. Keep any parallelism bounded to same-batch research only; plan, task-gen, and later execution stay sequential.
11. Stop before code changes or implementation begin.
12. Recommend the next entry point:

• $ralph-execute when the installed harness should take over execution
• $ralph-prd when requirements are still too unclear and need reshaping

Outputs

• .ralph/state/spec-queue.json
• specs/INDEX.md
• specs/<spec-id>-<slug>/spec.md
• specs/<spec-id>-<slug>/research.md when research is complete for that spec
• specs/<spec-id>-<slug>/plan.md
• specs/<spec-id>-<slug>/tasks.md when planning is sufficiently complete
• a concise recommendation for the next public entry point

References

• Read references/planning-artifacts.md for the planning artifact set and sequencing expectations.

Completion

Stop once the queue-ready planning artifacts are written or updated and the next recommended entry point is clear.