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.