Skill: Work Discipline

Purpose

Behavioral guardrails for while you're actively implementing. This complements planning skills (what to build) and verification skills (did it work) with guidance on how to work.

1. Plan Mode Defaults

• Enter plan mode for any non-trivial task (3+ steps or architectural decisions)
• If something goes sideways mid-implementation, stop and re-plan — don't keep pushing a broken approach
• Use plan mode for verification steps too, not just building
• Write detailed specs upfront to reduce ambiguity

2. Subagent Strategy

• Use subagents liberally to keep the main context window clean
• Offload research, exploration, and parallel analysis to subagents
• One task per subagent for focused execution
• For complex problems, throw more compute at it via subagents rather than cramming everything into one context
• Waiting on subagents for more than a few minutes? Arm a stall watchdog first (the "Arm the watchdog" step in /autopilot and /orchestrator). Silence must have a deadline; a hung agent otherwise blocks the lead forever

3. Verify As You Go

• Never declare a task complete without proving it works
• Run tests, check logs, demonstrate correctness after each meaningful change
• Diff behavior between main and your changes when relevant
• Ask yourself: "Would this pass code review without revision?"
• This is lighter than /verify — just the habit of checking your own work before moving on

4. Simplicity and Minimal Impact

• Make every change as simple as possible — impact minimal code
• For non-trivial changes, pause and ask "is there a more elegant way?"
• If a fix feels hacky, step back — knowing everything you know now, implement the clean solution
• Skip this for simple, obvious fixes — don't over-engineer
• Changes should only touch what's necessary — avoid introducing unrelated modifications

5. Bug Fixing

• When given a bug report, gather evidence first: read the error, check the code, understand the cause
• Point at logs, errors, failing tests — then resolve them
• Fix root causes, not symptoms. No temporary workarounds masquerading as fixes
• Don't shotgun-fix by trying multiple things at once — change one thing, test, iterate

6. Re-Plan Trigger

If any of these happen, stop coding and re-enter plan mode:

• The plan's assumptions no longer match what you're seeing in the code
• You've discovered a dependency the plan didn't account for
• A task is turning out 3x more complex than expected
• You're about to make changes outside the current phase scope