Skip to content

Skill reference: doc-set-planner

The doc-set-planner skill is the suite’s orchestrator: it does not author a single genre, it decomposes a broad subject into a coordinated SET of MIF documents, fans out to the member genre skills, and reconciles the cross-document relationship graph. This reference describes what it produces, how, when, and from what sources.

Property Value
Authors A coordinated, cross-linked set of MIF documents
Purpose group Orchestrator
MIF conceptType orchestrator
Target MIF level 3
Primary source MIF specification

A single genre skill answers a single-document request. Many real requests — “document the auth system”, “produce the full spec set for feature X” — span several documents that must agree with one another. doc-set-planner is the skill for that altitude: it plans the set, decides which genres compose it, delegates each member to its genre skill, and then proves the members are wired together into one MIF relationship graph rather than a pile of disconnected files.

It works from one of four recipes, each a named decomposition of a subject into a coherent set.

Recipe Produces
diataxis The four Diátaxis quadrants — tutorial, how-to, reference, explanation
ai-spec An AI-ready spec — feature spec plus an AI-architecture doc and EARS criteria
kiro The AWS Kiro three-document set — requirements.md, design.md, tasks.md
architecture An architecture set — arc42 and/or C4 with an ADR decision log

Singleton genres — an ADR, a changelog, an SRE runbook, a playbook, a Rust RFC, a Python PEP, a Google design doc — stand alone and are invoked directly, not through the planner.

doc-set-planner carries the recipes and the reconciliation procedure as durable instructions, and runs a three-phase flow.

  • Fan-out. The planner selects a recipe, expands it into the list of member documents, and delegates each to its genre skill — for example dispatching the diataxis recipe to the four quadrant skills. Each member is authored over the shared mif-frontmatter floor, with criteria shaped by ears-acceptance-criteria where the genre uses them. When a semantic corpus exists (the optional mif-corpus layer), the plan first searches it per member and surfaces strong hits as existing-coverage decisions — extend the found doc or create and cross-link it — with scores and ids shown.
  • Reconcile. Once the members exist, the planner resolves the cross-document relationships[] graph — declaring how each document references, supports, or derives from the others — so the set reads as one connected body of knowledge. With a corpus available, find-similar results per member are offered as candidate additional targets; candidates are accepted or rejected by the author, never written silently, and the recipe’s contract stays authoritative.
  • Link-completeness. A planner-check gate asserts the graph is complete: every intended relationship is present and every target resolves, with no dangling references. Each member is then proven conformant by mif-validate. The gate is deliberately corpus-independent: it checks the declared graph, never similarity, so planner verdicts are byte-identical with or without the optional tooling.

Reach for doc-set-planner when a request is plural — when the deliverable is a set whose documents must cross-reference and not contradict each other. The value is coordination: the planner guarantees coverage of the recipe’s quadrants and a complete, validated relationship graph, which hand-assembling separate documents rarely achieves.

Do not use it for a single artifact: a lone decision belongs to the adr skill, a lone procedure to a runbook, a lone release record to a changelog. Invoking the orchestrator for one document adds planning overhead with no set to coordinate. Match the altitude of the skill to the altitude of the request.

A request to “document the auth system” runs the architecture recipe: the planner fans out an arc42 document and a C4 model, delegates the key decisions to ADRs, reconciles their relationships[] so the C4 components reference the arc42 building blocks and the ADRs, and runs planner-check to confirm the graph is complete before the set is published.