Implementation Plan Risks And Checks — Claude Code Guide

An implementation plan is a risk and verification contract

A useful plan explains what will change, what will not change, how the result will be checked, and when to stop. It is not a prediction that the implementation will succeed.

Plans should be small enough for one review and explicit about public contracts, data, configuration, and rollback.

Plan review

1. Compare the plan with the task scope.
2. Remove unrelated cleanup and speculative improvements.
3. Name a verification step for each success criterion.
4. Add a rollback or recovery point.
5. Mark assumptions as Unknown.
6. Wait for the owner decision before implementation.

Plan skeleton

# PLAN.md

Goal: <observable outcome>
In scope: <paths and behavior>
Out of scope: <explicit exclusions>
Steps:
1. <small change>
2. <focused check>
Risks: <list>
Rollback: <checkpoint>
Stop if: <condition>
Status: proposed; execution result: Unknown.