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Chapter 03

Plan and task templates

A Deep Work Plan is a directory of markdown files. The shape of that directory — and of each file inside it — is what makes a plan reviewable by both humans and agents.

Plan structure

A plan is a directory under .dwp/plans/ named PLAN_<slug>/. It contains:

  • README.md — the plan overview: goal, source material, task table, and status. Each task file is named <n>.task_<slug>.md and follows the ten normative sections rendered above, in the order defined by the installed skill.
  • PROGRESS.md — a running log of execution.

Task file structure

Each task file is named <n>.task_<slug>.md and follows the ten normative sections rendered above, in the order defined by the installed skill. Each task re-anchors to the plan’s goal before it acts, which keeps an agent from drifting over a long, multi-hour horizon.

The Final Review

Every plan must end with exactly one mandatory task: the Final Review. It closes the plan in three ordered passes — nothing in the security pass is relaxed:

  1. Security pass — audit everything the plan changed for secrets, injection risks, and new attack surface, and keep docs/SECURITY.md current. Security is not a separate workstream bolted on at the end: every plan leaves its own changes audited, and a critical finding blocks completion.
  2. Final-state validation — the repository’s full validation runs and passes on the last relevant state, after the final fix.
  3. Skills reconciliation — every task recorded its own skills disposition while its evidence was fresh; the review reconciles the ledger. The Executive Report remains available on request.

README and PROGRESS conventions

The plan README.md must contain a title (# Deep Work Plan: <name>), a prose goal statement, an optional source-material section, a task table (number, task name, status checkbox), and a plan-status line in the form <n>/<total> tasks complete.

PROGRESS.md is an append-only execution log. Each entry records an ISO 8601 timestamp, the task number and name, what was done, and any deviations or skip reasons. Because it only ever grows, it is a reliable history of how the plan actually unfolded.

Headings and cross-references

All headings use sentence case, and documents avoid marketing language and exclamation marks. These conventions keep plans consistent across agents and over time.