Skip to content

Skill

Plan Eng Review

gstack

Reviews a proposed technical plan the way an engineering manager would - is the architecture sound, are the tradeoffs right, what will bite later - before any code is written. It judges the approach on paper, unlike a pre-merge review that reads a finished diff or a debugger that chases a live bug.

Situations it fits

Before anyone writes code, an engineer hands you a proposed design for a new realtime sync system and wants a hard look at whether the architecture and its tradeoffs will hold up - or bite the team in six months.
Plan Eng Review. The four all sound like "look at the code," which is the trap. plan-eng-review reviews the approach on paper before any code is written. plan-eng-review judges a proposed design before code exists; review reads a finished diff at merge time; investigate chases a live bug to its root cause; health tracks the whole codebase's quality over time.
You're sipping cold brew while the team lead spreads container diagrams across a whiteboard and asks whether a planned flood of twelve microservices will create a cascading disaster during rush hour - and zero lines of code have been written yet.
Plan Eng Review. plan-eng-review (gstack) wins because the scene is a pre-build critique of a future architecture with no code committed, exactly the engineering-manager review it performs. The genuinely tempting distractor is review (gstack), which appears close because both involve reading technical diagrams, but its trap is that it only evaluates a finished diff ready to merge, not a sketched design on a whiteboard. investigate (gstack) and health-gstack both miss because one chases existing bugs and the other tracks aggregate code quality over time, neither of which matches a single pending architecture conversation.

3 scenarios in the bank answer to Plan Eng Review. The rest are in the game.

Skills it gets confused with

These share a family with Plan Eng Review, which is another way of saying they are the ones you might reach for by mistake.

Knowing what Plan Eng Review does is the easy half. Telling it apart from the others under time pressure is the game.

Today's session

Plan Eng Review is part of garrytan/gstack. Licence: MIT. The description above was written for this game, not taken from the skill.