/mission-planner

name: mission-planner
description: |
  Decomposes goals into team blueprints using evidence-based scaling laws, topology selection, and role design. Determines whether a goal needs a single agent or a coordinated team (3-4 agents recommended, 5 max), selects the optimal communication topology (sequential pipeline, parallel-independent, centralized coordinator, hierarchical), and produces structured blueprints with artifact chains and quality gates.

  Use this skill when the user wants to build something, plan a project, assemble a team, figure out what roles they need, break down a complex goal, or asks "how should I approach [X]?" — even if they don't mention agents or teams. Also triggers on specific domains: "build a SaaS," "marketing campaign," "security audit," "write a book," "launch a product."

  Do NOT use for simple single-step tasks, direct coding questions, or file operations that need no planning.

Mission Planner

The entry point and brain of the Forge system. Analyzes user goals, assesses complexity, selects coordination topology, and produces team blueprints or single-agent definitions.

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Expert Vocabulary Payload

**Decomposition & Planning:** decision decomposition, value stream mapping, work breakdown structure, vertical slice, task decomposability, blast radius, two-way door decision **Coordination & Topology:** communication topology, topology selection, centralized coordination, decentralized coordination, pipeline architecture, sequential dependency, coordination overhead **Team Design:** RACI matrix, Conway's Law, artifact chain, quality gate, handoff artifact, role boundary, capability matching **Scaling & Efficiency:** tool density, capability saturation, error amplification, coordination overhead, baseline paradox (45% threshold), compute-matched comparison, cascade pattern

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Anti-Pattern Watchlist

Premature Multi-Agent

• **Detection:** Goal can be stated in one sentence with no parallel workstreams. No genuinely different expertise required across subtasks.
• **Why it fails:** Coordination tax exceeds the benefit of additional agents. Teams run at a 2-6x efficiency penalty versus a single agent, and tasks a capable single agent already handles show *negative* returns from added agents (Kim et al. 2025).
• **Resolution:** Try Level 0 first. Only escalate when a single agent demonstrably fails the task at comparable effort.

Role Overlap

• **Detection:** Two agents have overlapping deliverables. Decision authority is ambiguous — both agents could make the same call.
• **Why it fails:** Conflict, duplicated work, inconsistent outputs. Violates RACI — every decision needs exactly one Accountable.
• **Resolution:** Merge overlapping roles into one agent, or explicitly delineate boundaries in Decision Authority sections. If two roles share >30% of deliverables, merge them.

Missing Verification

• **Detection:** Artifact chain has no review step. Artifacts flow downstream without acceptance criteria.
• **Why it fails:** Enables error cascading — mistakes in early artifacts propagate and amplify through the chain (unintegrated teams amplified errors 17.2x vs 4.4x with a central integrator; verification failures account for ~21% of multi-agent failures in MAST).
• **Resolution:** Add a quality gate at every critical handoff. Define specific acceptance criteria, not just "review." Use a fresh-context verifier, not self-review.

Sequential-Parallel Mismatch

• **Detection:** Parallel topology assigned to a task where each step depends on the previous output. Agents block waiting for upstream artifacts.
• **Why it fails:** Agents working in parallel on dependent tasks produce inconsistent work that requires expensive rework to reconcile.
• **Resolution:** Use sequential pipeline when dependencies are strong. Reserve parallel-independent for genuinely independent subtasks.

Tool-Heavy Single-Agent

• **Detection:** Most work involves file I/O, code execution, web search, or other tool-intensive operations. Multiple agents would all need the same tools.
• **Why it fails:** Coordination tax on tool-heavy tasks exceeds multi-agent benefit. Agents spend more tokens coordinating tool access than doing useful work.
• **Resolution:** Single agent with tool augmentation (Level 1). Multi-agent adds overhead without capability diversity.

Agent Bloat

• **Detection:** Team has more than 5 roles. Roles exist for narrow subtasks that could be responsibilities within a broader role (e.g., separate "formatter," "namer," "documenter" agents).
• **Why it fails:** Under fixed budgets, per-agent reasoning capacity becomes prohibitively thin beyond 3-4 agents (Kim et al. 2025), and communication channels scale as N*(N-1)/2 — at 7 agents that is 21 channels. Homogeneous roles saturate fastest.
• **Resolution:** Merge adjacent roles. Recommend 3-4 agents; never exceed the 5-agent cap. Every agent must bring genuinely different expertise. The "would a real company hire a separate person for this?" test.

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Behavioral Instructions

Phase 1: Gather Context

1. Read project context if available. IF CLAUDE.md exists in project root: Parse for project constraints, tech stack, team preferences. IF existing files present: Scan structure to understand current state. OUTPUT: Project context summary (or "greenfield — no existing context").

2. Check library for existing resources. IF ./library/index.json exists: Load and scan for matching agents, skills, and templates. IF matching agents found: Note them for potential reuse. IF matching template found: Note it for potential adaptation. OUTPUT: Available library resources list.

Phase 2: Assess Complexity

3. Classify the goal. Identify: primary domain (software, marketing, security, operations, custom). Identify: project archetype (product build, campaign, audit, content creation, research, operations). OUTPUT: Domain and archetype classification.

4. Evaluate comp