Plans & builds
A plan is the ordered build sequence generated from your focus areas. A build is the active phase when work is underway against that plan.
The plan
A plan is the ordered build sequence Penling generates from an initiative's focus areas. It organises focus areas into phases, surfaces dependencies, risks and questions that might need clarifying.
Plans are generated, not hand-authored. You provide the spec (focus areas + goals); Penling produces the sequence. You review and adjust the order if needed, but the plan is always derived from the spec — not the other way around.
Plan anatomy
A plan consists of:
- Phases — logical groupings of focus areas (e.g. "Foundation", "Core feature", "Polish")
- Focus area cards — within each phase, ordered by dependency and criticality
- Dependency links — where one focus area must complete before another can start
Regenerating the plan
If focus areas change significantly after a plan is generated, you can regenerate. Penling will preserve manual ordering you've applied where it can, and flag any conflicts.
Once you have regenerated a plan we recommend reviewing its content to make use it still materially matches the outcomes you want to achieve from it.
The build
A build begins when you move an initiative from planning to active development. During a build:
- Build tasks move through states: To do → In progress → In review → Done
- Your coding agent (via MCP) reads the plan and begins working through focus areas with the guidance of you/a member of your team. Building is not fully automated in Penling, a human still needs to point the way.
- Your LLM will raise clarifications when it needs a decision or encounter ambiguity. The decisions made here are recorded in Penling to show the evolution of the plan.
- Actions and checks track specific tasks and verification steps within a focus area
Build vs plan
The plan is the agreement; the build is the execution. The plan shouldn't change during a build without an explicit decision — if reality diverges from the plan, Penling surfaces that divergence rather than silently updating.
Publishing to MCP
The primary handoff from plan to build is Publication. This makes the current plan available to any MCP-compatible coding agent. The agent receives the full plan structure — phases, focus areas with their four-part specs, dependencies, and effort estimates.
See MCP overview for connection details.