Review a PLAN before delegating work
Plan review is the human evaluation of a proposed implementation approach before it becomes delegated work. It catches missing constraints, scope drift, dependency mistakes and weak completion conditions while those decisions are still inexpensive to change.
This review belongs to the PLAN phase of AI Architect Mastery's AI Driven Development Methodology. An agent may propose the plan; the human authorizes progression into TASKs.
What the review must establish
- Coverage: the steps address the approved PRD and its acceptance criteria.
- Order: dependencies are explicit; a step does not rely on an unapproved contract.
- Scope: unrelated refactoring or behavior changes are not hidden inside the approach.
- Completion: each step has an observable end condition and a verification path.
- Checkpoints: architectural or high-risk decisions are inspected before downstream work relies on them.
How the decision becomes durable
Review against the actual PRD and repository constraints, record accepted changes to the plan, and resolve material assumptions before handing off work. Approval applies to that approach and scope, not to any future expansion an agent might suggest.
Constructed decision: reject a broad rewrite
The PRD asks for one export authorization correction. The proposed PLAN replaces the entire access-control layer first. Unless the requirement and architecture justify that dependency, the human revises the plan toward the existing helper and bounded regression checks.
Limits of planning
A reviewed plan reduces preventable mistakes but cannot predict every implementation finding. If evidence invalidates the approach, return to PLAN deliberately. Do not treat approval as a reason to continue with a disproven assumption.