The plan-first skill: cut the dream to a v1 you can finish

Size kills more beginner builds than bugs ever do. You describe the whole dream in one message, Claude starts building the whole dream, and four nights later you've got half of everything and none of it works well enough to send to anyone.

The plan-first skill puts a plan between the idea and the building. It makes you say what the thing does in one sentence, sorts everything else into what ships now and what waits, orders the moves so each night ends on something finished, and writes down what done looks like in words you can check by looking at the screen. Nothing gets built while it runs. That's the point of it.

The skill is free, it sits in our public freeskills repo, and it runs the moment you drop the folder in. If you haven't even picked a project yet, run claude-orientation instead and come back here once you have one.

Three lines. Grab the repo, make sure your skills folder is there, move plan-first into it.

Restart Claude Code and it's there. That's the entire setup. No keys, no config.

Type /plan-first and describe what you want to build, messily. Let it ramble out of you. The skill reads your idea back in three lines and makes you confirm it understood before it goes any further, which catches the misunderstanding that would otherwise cost you a week.

Then it pushes for one sentence: if this only did one thing, what would that be. Everything you said gets sorted into a v1 list of three to five items and a later list, and each cut comes with a one-clause reason. It orders three to six moves so the first one puts something on screen, and turns done into a checkable list. The plan saves to ~/plans/ and it tells you the path.

Expect it to cut things you're attached to. Nothing gets deleted, it goes on the later list and you can add it in week two once the thing exists and a real person has used it.

Don't tidy the idea up first. It cuts better with the full picture, including the parts you already suspect are too much.

You started, it sprawled, and now nothing quite works. The plan still helps. It just starts from where the mess is.

If you argue with every cut, a date settles it faster than a debate. Give it the date and let the calendar do the trimming.

Here is what the skill does to an idea, and why it changes how your builds end.

1. 1Hook: there's a brand new free Claude skill that takes you from an idea so big you never start to a v1 plan you can finish this week.
2. 2Mechanism: you describe the whole idea, messy and complete, and it reads it back in three lines so you can confirm it understood. Then it pushes you down to one sentence for the single job, and splits everything else into a v1 list of three to five items and a later list with a reason next to every cut. You get back the moves in order and a done-when line you can check by looking at the screen.
3. 3Transformation: you sit down tomorrow night knowing exactly what you're doing and exactly what you're not, and the thing gets finished instead of abandoned at 70 percent. Finishing one small version teaches you more than a big one you never show anyone.
4. 4Close: the plan skill is free, and there are 55 of them. If you want the path that runs from the plan to a finished thing somebody's actually using, Claude Code Club is $9 a month. Link's below.

Tonight, run it on the idea that's been sitting in your head the longest, then do only the first move it writes. The rest of the plan will still be there tomorrow.