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name: pincer-planning description: "Bidirectional planning for ambiguous or design-heavy tasks. Use when the user requests help breaking down a problem or formulating a plan, and also when an existing plan has too many gaps or needs refinement; converge top-down framing with bottom-up inventory and explicit questions."

Pincer Planning

Overview

Create a plan by pairing a top-down framing with a bottom-up inventory, stress-testing both with questions, then merging into a single, gap-checked plan. Use for design, strategy, or fuzzy scopes.

Quick start

1. Draft top-down framing (goal, constraints, success criteria).
2. Draft bottom-up inventory (facts, assets, risks, unknowns).
3. Ask clarifying questions (use AskUser).
4. Flip perspective and refine the opposite view.
5. Merge into a single plan and list remaining gaps.

Core Guidance

• Start with either top-down or bottom-up; explicitly label the other side as provisional.
• Ask 3–7 targeted questions that would change the plan, then wait for answers.
• After answering, re-run the opposite perspective to find contradictions or gaps.
• Converge: produce a merged plan plus a short gap list (what’s still unknown).
• Keep planning separate from execution; do not run tools during planning.

Trust / Permissions

• Always: Read local files, ask clarifying questions, draft plans.
• Ask: Any writes to disk (e.g., saving plan.json), network calls, or execution.
• Never: Destructive actions or credential exfiltration.

Resources

• references/pincer-checklist.md: Question prompts and convergence checks.
• templates/plan.json: Plan scaffold with top-down and bottom-up sections.

Validation

• Confirm top-down and bottom-up sections converge; list explicit gaps.
• Ensure questions are answered before final plan is delivered.