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Rewrite Planner and Designer prompts from first principles #58

Description

@jrpbuilds

Parent

Part of #46.

Relationships

Depends on #47 and #56.

Goal

Rebuild the Planner and Designer prompts as focused role contracts that produce high-quality OpenSpec artifacts without teaching them SpecOps scheduler/orchestration internals.

Keep

The new prompts should retain the semantic responsibilities needed for good planning work:

  • author the exact artifact assigned by the dispatch;
  • follow the active OpenSpec schema/instructions;
  • use supplied repository evidence and approved upstream artifacts;
  • produce clear requirements/design/tasks at the appropriate abstraction level;
  • surface genuinely material unresolved decisions rather than silently inventing them;
  • preserve consistency with already-approved artifacts;
  • return the required handoff/result contract.

For task planning, concise guidance such as the following is appropriate:

Produce coherent implementation tasks with explicit dependencies. Keep tightly related work together; split work when boundaries are genuinely independent.

Remove/reduce

Eliminate prompt material that exists mainly to teach runtime orchestration, including:

  • detailed batching/scheduler algorithms;
  • implementation-concurrency accounting;
  • lane refill mechanics;
  • broad tutorials on task write-surface overlap/context bootstrap costs;
  • repeated “author exactly one artifact / do not author other artifacts” wording where the dispatch contract makes ownership explicit;
  • duplicate OpenSpec workflow legality prose;
  • current-job paths/IDs supplied by Make specialist dispatch payloads carry current-job context #56.

Do not remove useful planning quality guidance merely because it mentions downstream implementation. The test is whether the text improves the artifact itself or explains orchestration mechanics.

Rewrite method

  • Start from a minimal new prompt rather than trimming line-by-line.
  • Add back constraints only for demonstrated semantic regressions.
  • Keep Planner and Designer distinct where their judgement genuinely differs.
  • Prefer dispatch-specific facts over permanent examples of every possible artifact state.

Acceptance criteria

  • Planner and Designer prompts are rebuilt from minimal contracts.
  • Exact current artifact responsibility/path comes from dispatch context rather than repeated generic prompt branching.
  • Both roles still follow custom OpenSpec schemas correctly.
  • Material-decision escalation remains intact.
  • Task output remains coherent and dependency-aware without teaching the parallel scheduler.
  • Prompts contain no detailed Todo/progress/concurrency bookkeeping protocols.
  • Existing hard tool/permission boundaries remain unchanged.
  • Representative proposal/spec/design/tasks generation scenarios retain or improve quality.
  • Final prompt sizes are substantially below v1.6.

Out of scope

  • Coordinator/Implementer/Reviewer prompt rewrites.
  • Deterministic task grouping or scheduling.
  • Prompt-budget finalization.

Activity

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