Planning

Planning is the first step of the operator loop. A good plan means the difference between a clean parallel run and a coordination mess.

Fitness Assessment

Multi-Claude uses evidence from three scored trials to assess fitness:

Work Class	Grade	Speed	Break-even
Backend/state/domain	B (strong)	Win	~3 packets
UI/interaction/seam-heavy	A- (moderate)	Neutral	~5 packets
Control-plane/infra	B+ (moderate)	Neutral	~5-6 packets

multi-claude plan evaluate \
  --work-class backend_law \
  --packets 6 \
  --coupling low \
  --ownership clean

The engine produces:

• Fit assessment — strong, moderate, or weak
• Anti-pattern detection — 8 known failure shapes
• Recommendation — go, caution, or single-claude

Anti-Patterns

The doctrine engine detects these failure shapes before you start:

1. Too few packets — Coordination overhead dominates
2. High coupling — Semantic reconciliation unbounded
3. Shared file ownership — Merge conflicts guaranteed
4. Sequential critical path — Parallelism impossible
5. Unstable floor — Build/test broken before you begin
6. Operator bottleneck — Too many gates for one human
7. Missing verifier — No independent check on worker output
8. Seam file collision — Shared CSS/config without section ownership

Blueprints

A blueprint defines the packet graph:

multi-claude blueprint init --template backend_law

Templates provide starting structures for common work classes. Each blueprint contains:

• Packets — Named units of work with descriptions
• File ownership — Which files each packet may touch (exclusive)
• Dependencies — Edges between packets (hard deps = must complete first)
• Waves — Parallel execution groups derived from dependency order
• Gates — Verification checkpoints between waves

Validation

multi-claude blueprint validate

Checks:

• No file overlap between packets in the same wave
• All dependency edges point to existing packets
• No circular dependencies
• Gates reference valid packets
• Guard conditions are satisfiable

Freeze

multi-claude blueprint freeze

Computes a SHA-256 hash of the material blueprint fields. After freeze, the blueprint is immutable — no edits allowed. This is the contract workers execute against.

multi-claude blueprint render

Generates a markdown contract document from the frozen blueprint, replacing hand-authored planning docs.