Build a plan
How to generate, review, and adjust a plan from your focus areas — and what to check before handing it to your coding agent.
A plan is generated from your focus areas. This guide covers what happens when you generate a plan, how to review it, and how to adjust it before handing off to your coding agent.
Before generating
Make sure your focus areas are in good shape:
- Every focus area has specific, testable results
- Every focus area has at least one boundary
- You've answered all open clarifications (or consciously deferred them)
- Goals are set and every focus area connects to at least one
A plan generated from a weak spec will require more rework than taking an extra 20 minutes on the spec. Generate when you're confident a developer could implement any focus area independently.
Generating the plan
Click Generate plan from the initiative view. Penling will:
- Analyse the focus areas and their dependencies
- Group them into logical phases
- Assign relative effort estimates (S / M / L / XL)
- Surface any focus areas with unresolved dependencies or missing goal connections
The generation usually takes a few seconds. The result is a phased, ordered plan.
Reviewing the plan
Walk through the plan phase by phase:
Check the phase structure. Phases should represent logical chunks of work — foundation, core feature, edge cases, polish. If the phases feel arbitrary, use the drag handles to reorganise.
Check the ordering within phases. Within each phase, focus areas should be ordered by dependency. If focus area B depends on focus area A, A should come first. The plan generator handles most of this, but it can miss non-obvious dependencies.
Check effort estimates. The estimates are relative, not absolute. An XL focus area should take roughly 4× as long as an S. If an XL seems undersized or an S seems huge, adjust the estimate manually.
Check for flagged focus areas. Penling flags focus areas with: missing results, unresolved clarifications, no goal connection, or suspected dependency issues. Address these before publishing.
Adjusting the plan
Reorder: Drag focus areas within or between phases. The plan stores the order you set.
Move to a phase: Right-click a focus area and choose Move to phase to move it without dragging.
Add a phase: Click Add phase at the bottom of the plan. Name it and drag focus areas into it.
Remove a phase: Empty a phase by moving its focus areas, then delete the empty phase.
Publishing to MCP
When you're satisfied with the plan, click Publish to MCP. This makes the plan available to your coding agent. See Publishing a plan to MCP for what happens after.