:cody plan

:cody plan kicks off the Plan phase for a new project. It walks you through idea discovery, then drafts a Discovery document, a PRD, and an Implementation Plan, with explicit review gates between each.

When to use it

Use :cody plan once, at the start of a brand-new (greenfield) project.

Do not use :cody plan if:

• You already have application code in the project. Run :cody refresh instead. Cody auto-detects the brownfield case and runs the equivalent flow.
• You already have a Plan phase in progress. :cody plan checks for existing plan documents before doing anything and stops if it finds them, so you don’t overwrite work in progress.

What it does

When you run :cody plan, Cody walks through this flow:

1. Safety check. Cody checks cody-projects/product-builder/plan/ for existing documents. If any are found, the command stops and lists them. This prevents accidental overwrites.
2. Note available prototypes. If you’ve built any prototypes already, Cody mentions them so you can pull one into the planning conversation if you want.
3. Idea discovery. Cody asks What do you want to create? and runs an interactive Q&A to understand the outcome you want.
   • Type help me for example answers if you’re stuck.
   • Type no more to cut the Q&A short.
4. Confirm understanding. Cody summarizes its understanding back to you and asks for explicit approval. This is the “we both agree” gate before anything is written.
5. Create the project workspace. Cody creates cody.json at the project root and the cody-projects/product-builder/plan/ folder.
6. Draft discovery.md. Cody fills in the discovery template from the conversation. You review and request edits, or say continue.
7. Draft prd.md. Cody reads discovery.md and drafts the Product Requirements Document. Iterate until you’re both happy with it.
8. Draft plan.md. Cody reads prd.md and drafts the Implementation Plan. Same iteration loop.
9. End of phase. Cody prints PLAN PHASE : COMPLETED and points you at :cody build to start the next phase.

Output

By the time :cody plan finishes, you’ll have:

cody.json                                       # phase: "plan", version: "0.0.0"
cody-projects/product-builder/plan/
├── discovery.md
├── prd.md
└── plan.md

For the brownfield variant (existing codebase), brownfield-analysis.md replaces discovery.md. That flow is triggered by :cody refresh, not by :cody plan.

What’s next

When the Plan phase ends, run :cody build to create the feature backlog and start shipping versions.

For the conceptual overview, see The Plan Phase.