Understanding Plans

Everything in the Plan tab — how tasks are structured, how to read and organize them, and how to hand the plan off for delivery.

Overview

A plan is a two-level hierarchy of tasks attached to a brief. The top level contains parent tasks that represent the major areas of work. Each parent task contains subtasks — the individual units of work with detailed descriptions and acceptance criteria. Plans are designed to be reviewed, adjusted, and then delivered to your team or AI agent via the Taskmaster CLI.

Task Hierarchy

Parent tasks represent distinct areas of work within the scope of the brief. Each parent task has a title, description, and a set of subtasks. Parent tasks are created first during plan generation and appear in the plan view as soon as they are ready.

Subtasks are the detailed steps inside each parent task. Each subtask is generated with:

A title and description scoped tightly to the parent task
Acceptance criteria that define when the work is complete
A complexity score that indicates how much effort the task requires

Subtasks are elaborated in parallel — each parent task is expanded at the same time. They appear progressively as each elaboration thread finishes.

Reading the Plan

Task status

Every task and subtask can be in one of three states:

To Do — Work has not started
In Progress — Work is underway
Done — Work is complete

You can move tasks between states from the plan view. When grouped by status, the task list is organized into sections by state so you can see what is in progress at a glance.

Complexity badge

Tasks show a complexity badge based on the AI's assessment during generation. The badge gives a rough indication of effort — useful for spotting which tasks are likely to take the most time and for planning assignments.

Next best task

One task in the plan is marked as the next best task to work on. This is the highest-priority in-progress task if one exists, otherwise the first to-do task. It is marked with a small indicator in the task row to help you and your team quickly orient when picking up work.

Task detail view

Clicking a task opens the full detail view. Here you can read the complete task description and acceptance criteria, see all subtasks, and interact with the task's AI conversation thread for deeper context on what was generated and why.

View Options

The Display button in the top-right corner of the Plan tab gives you control over how tasks are shown.

View mode:

List — A vertical list of tasks. Parent tasks show an expand/collapse control to show or hide their subtasks inline.
Kanban — A board view with columns for To Do, In Progress, and Done. Parent tasks appear as cards you can drag between columns.

Group by:

None — Tasks are shown in a single flat list ordered by position
Status — Tasks are grouped into sections by their current state

Organizing Tasks

You can reorder parent tasks by dragging them within the list view. The order you set is preserved and reflected when the plan is delivered to the Taskmaster CLI. Moving a task to a different status group (when grouped by status) updates its status automatically.

Refining the Plan with Chat

The plan view includes an AI chat panel scoped to your plan. Use it to make targeted adjustments after generation without regenerating from scratch:

Ask the AI to split a parent task that covers too much ground
Request a missing subtask for a concern the plan overlooked
Ask it to rewrite acceptance criteria for a specific task
Request a scope change to a task description

The AI reads the current plan state — all existing tasks and their content — before making any changes. It updates tasks directly rather than producing suggestions for you to apply manually.

Expanding Tasks with AI

If a parent task does not have subtasks, or you want to generate additional subtasks after the initial plan, you can expand it using the sparkle icon that appears when you hover the task title. The AI elaborates the task into subtasks using the same context from the brief, the parent task description, and the sibling tasks to avoid overlap.

Assigning Tasks

You can assign any task or subtask to a team member using the assignee control in the task row. If your workspace has background AI agents configured, you can also assign tasks directly to an agent.

Delivering the Plan

Once you are satisfied with the plan, the "Deliver with Taskmaster" button in the top-right of the Plan tab gives you a one-line CLI command to run in your terminal. This command:

Installs the Taskmaster CLI if it is not already present
Authenticates your account automatically
Sets the CLI context to the current brief and lists your tasks

From there, you can use Taskmaster commands to work through the plan task by task, track progress, and hand off individual tasks to AI coding agents.

Common Taskmaster commands once set up:

task-master list                              # View all tasks in the plan
task-master next                              # Get the next task to work on
task-master show [id]                         # View full details for a task
task-master set-status --id=[id] --status=done  # Mark a task complete

The command shown in the panel is single-use and time-limited. A fresh command is generated each time you open the panel.

Tips

Review the parent tasks first before drilling into subtasks. If a parent task's scope seems off, edit the brief to clarify the intent and regenerate rather than manually reworking many subtasks.
Use the list view grouped by status when running a standup or checking team progress — it gives a clear picture of what is moving and what is blocked.
The kanban view works well for individual workflow management. Dragging cards between columns updates task status in real time.
Complexity scores are relative within a plan, not absolute estimates. Use them to identify tasks that may need to be broken down further or assigned to more experienced team members.