Planner Tool - Interactive Step-by-Step Planning

Break down complex projects into manageable, structured plans through step-by-step thinking

The planner tool helps you break down complex ideas, problems, or projects into multiple manageable steps. Perfect for system design, migration strategies, architectural planning, and feature development with branching and revision capabilities.

How It Works

The planner tool enables step-by-step thinking with incremental plan building:

Start with step 1: Describe the task or problem to plan
Continue building: Add subsequent steps, building the plan piece by piece
Revise when needed: Update earlier decisions as new insights emerge
Branch alternatives: Explore different approaches when multiple options exist
Continue across sessions: Resume planning later with full context

Example Prompts

Pro Tip

Claude supports sub-tasks where it will spawn and run separate background tasks. You can ask Claude to run PAL's planner with two separate ideas. Then when it's done, use PAL's consensus tool to pass the entire plan and get expert perspective from two powerful AI models on which one to work on first! Like performing AB testing in one-go without the wait!

Create two separate sub-tasks: in one, using planner tool show me how to add natural language support 
to my cooking app. In the other sub-task, use planner to plan how to add support for voice notes to my cooking app. 
Once done, start a consensus by sharing both plans to o3 and flash to give me the final verdict. Which one do 
I implement first?

Use pal's planner and show me how to add real-time notifications to our mobile app

Using the planner tool, show me how to add CoreData sync to my app, include any sub-steps

Key Features

Step-by-step breakdown: Build plans incrementally with full context awareness
Branching support: Explore alternative approaches when needed
Revision capabilities: Update earlier decisions as new insights emerge
Multi-session continuation: Resume planning across multiple sessions with context
Dynamic adjustment: Modify step count and approach as planning progresses
Visual presentation: ASCII charts, diagrams, and structured formatting
Professional output: Clean, structured plans without emojis or time estimates

More Examples

Using planner, plan the architecture for a new real-time chat system with 100k concurrent users

Create a plan using pal for migrating our React app from JavaScript to TypeScript

Develop a plan using pal for implementing CI/CD pipelines across our development teams

Best Practices

Start broad, then narrow: Begin with high-level strategy, then add implementation details
Include constraints: Consider technical, organizational, and resource limitations
Plan for validation: Include testing and verification steps
Think about dependencies: Identify what needs to happen before each step
Consider alternatives: Note when multiple approaches are viable
Enable continuation: Use continuation_id for multi-session planning

Continue With a New Plan

Like all other tools in PAL, you can continue with a new plan using the output from a previous plan by simply saying

Continue with pal's consensus tool and find out what o3:for and flash:against think of the plan

You can mix and match and take one output and feed it into another, continuing from where you left off using a different tool / model combination.

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