Project Planning & Journaling — a Claude Skill
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A skill for Claude that helps you scope a project properly before
writing any code, then keeps a living, resumable documentation journal of everything that
happens as the project moves forward.
Open a brand-new session weeks later, point Claude at project-journal/README.md, and it
knows exactly where things stand — no re-reading old chat history required.
Prefer a page over a chat? index.html is a static overview with the same
install links — live at
mh-mansouri.github.io/Project-Planning-Journaling,
or just open the file locally, no server needed.
What it does
- Project intake — before touching code, asks about project type, whether a Git repo
already exists (and if not, proposes a name, visibility, and license), short vs.
long-term goals, and whether this should stay public/open-source or could later become
a private product.
- Sets up a
project-journal/ folder — separate from your source code, with a
dashboard README.md, a decisions/ log, real code snippets/, and optional
per-session notes.
- Writes a skimmable dashboard — plain language, tables and Mermaid diagrams instead
of prose, checklists for every milestone, collapsible sections for anything long.
- Keeps itself up to date — after any meaningful step, decision, commit, or push, it
updates the roadmap, decisions log, git history, and next steps automatically.
- Offers a development-style choice — spec-first (plan fully up front),
interactive/iterative (flexible, journal captures decisions after the fact), or a
milestone-based hybrid.
- Runs a routine review, not just event-triggered updates — at whatever cadence you
pick (weekly by default): every link still resolves, no decision's been silently
overridden, no roadmap item has gone stale unnoticed, and any cited external sources
are still reputable, not just still online.
Install
Option A — one click (easiest):
Download project-planning-journaling.skill, open
it in Claude, and click Save skill. (Skill saving must be enabled for your account or
organization.)
Option B — from the source folder:
Copy the project-planning-journaling/ folder into your
skills directory.
Option C — any other AI chat (ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, ...):
Copy universal-prompt.md into your first message — no install,
no file upload, works anywhere.
Use it
Just tell Claude you're starting (or resuming) a project, for example:
I'm starting a new side project — a CLI tool for renaming photo batches. Let's plan it
out before we write anything.
or, on an existing project:
Set up a project journal for everything we've built so far, and keep it updated from
now on.
or, to resume:
Open the project journal and tell me where we left off.
Good to know
The skill asks up front whether a project should stay public/open-source or might later
be forked into a private branch and developed as a standalone product — but the actual
decision (and any legal/licensing follow-up) is yours to make. The skill records it, it
doesn't make it for you.
Grounded in established practice
The steps aren't invented from nothing — they draw on ten freely available sources
(architecture decision records, documentation frameworks, changelog and commit
conventions, discovery-phase methodology, Scrum) plus five commercially published
books/standards cited for their concepts only. Full list, evidence that each source is
independently reputable (not just a top search result), and which step each one backs,
in references/research.md.
This repo follows its own Step 6: two weekly GitHub Actions keep the list honest — one
re-checks every link, the other opens a reminder issue for the reputation recheck.
More skills like this
- Embedded / IoT Mentor —
picks the microcontroller, board, and toolchain for a hardware project, MVP-first.
- Business Name Fit —
picks or checks a business/brand name that's authentic to your origin and lands well
in the markets you're selling into.
Contributing
Improvements are welcome — especially real-world cases where the journal format broke
down or the intake questions missed something. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Release history is in CHANGELOG.md.
License
Released under the MIT License — free to use, share, and build on.
One bundled file is third-party: the 2020 Scrum Guide, redistributed under
CC BY-SA 4.0 and not covered by the
MIT License. Full attribution is in NOTICE.md.
