Plan review

Confirm the target

Name what is being reviewed (which plan, solving what problem) and the goal it serves before critiquing. If the idea itself is unvetted, run office-hours first — a plan review sharpens a plan; it cannot justify one.

Step 0: scope challenge (before any section review)

1. Reuse first — what existing code already solves each sub-problem? Prefer capturing outputs from existing flows over building parallel ones.
2. Minimum change set — flag anything deferrable without blocking the goal.
3. Complexity smell — more than ~8 files touched or 2 new classes/services: stop and challenge whether fewer moving parts reach the same goal. Propose the minimal version; let the owner decide.
4. Built-in over custom — for each new pattern or component, check whether the framework/runtime ships one before accepting a hand-rolled version.
5. No silent drops — deferred work (distribution, ops, migrations) goes in an explicit "NOT in scope" list, not out of memory.

Once the scope decision is made, commit to it — do not re-argue scope during the section reviews below.

Section review

Work in order, at most ~8 top issues total across sections: Architecture → Code quality → Tests → Performance. For tests, demand a verifiable check per plan step — a plan step without its proving command is a wish (see verification-before-completion).

Judgment instincts to apply throughout

• Blast radius — worst case, and how many systems/people it touches.
• Boring by default — innovation tokens are scarce; proven tech elsewhere.
• Incremental over big-bang — strangler fig, canary, refactor-then-change.
• Reversibility — flags and staged rollouts make being wrong cheap.
• Essential vs accidental complexity — is this solving a real problem or one the plan created?

End with a verdict: approve / reduce scope / rework, with the blocking items.

Provenance

Distilled from the gstack /plan-eng-review skill by Garry Tan (garrytan/gstack, MIT) — method only, none of the runtime (no brain preflight, design-doc discovery, or interactive scaffolding carried over).