Executing Plans Skill

A plan's value is realised or destroyed at execution time. The two failure modes: rigid execution (following a plan reality has invalidated) and drift (quietly improvising until the work no longer resembles the plan and nobody decided that). The discipline is the same for both: deviations are decisions, made visibly.

What This Skill Produces

• The work, executed step-by-step with per-step verification actually run
• An execution log: step → result → verification outcome → any deviation with its reason
• A plan feedback note: what the plan got wrong (feeds the next plan)

Execution Method

1. Load the plan and check it's still true. Before step 1: do the plan's assumptions still hold (the branch, the data, the constraint)? A plan written yesterday can be stale today; two minutes of validation beats an hour of executing a fiction.
2. One step, then its verification — actually run. The verification isn't decoration: run the command, check the observable, record the result. Advancing on "that probably worked" is how step 6 fails mysteriously because step 3 silently didn't.
3. Classify every divergence out loud. When reality disagrees with the plan, stop and classify:
   • Plan-preserving detail — the plan's intent holds, the mechanics differ slightly → note it in the log, continue
   • Plan deviation — the approach must change for this step → amend the plan visibly (strikethrough + new step), state why, continue
   • Plan invalidation — a stop condition hit, or the goal itself is now wrong → STOP; report; replan with the human before another line of work The cardinal sin is treating an invalidation as a detail because stopping feels like failure.
4. Respect the stop conditions absolutely. They were written calm; you are now in flow and biased toward momentum. The "must not do" list doesn't bend for convenience — if it should, that's a visible plan amendment, decided, not slid into.
5. Checkpoint on schedule. At each planned checkpoint (or ~every 30-45 min of work): where am I vs the plan, what's the log show, is the remaining plan still right? Multi-session work ends each session with a state note: done through step N, next action, open questions — the resume beats re-derivation.