What it does
Project intake
Before touching code: project type, whether a Git repo exists (name, visibility, license if not), short vs. long-term goals, and public vs. private-product path.
A dedicated journal folder
project-journal/, separate from source: a dashboard README, a decisions log, real code snippets, optional per-session notes.
A skimmable dashboard
Plain language, tables and Mermaid diagrams over prose, checklists for every milestone, collapsible sections for anything long.
Stays current on its own
After any meaningful step, decision, commit, or push, it updates the roadmap, decisions log, git history, and next steps automatically.
A development-style choice
Spec-first (plan fully up front), interactive/iterative (flexible, journal captures decisions after the fact), or a milestone-based hybrid.
Routine review, not just event-triggered
At whatever cadence you pick (weekly by default): links still resolve, no decision silently overridden, no roadmap item stale unnoticed, cited sources still reputable.
Install
One-click Claude Skill
Download project-planning-journaling.skill, open it in Claude, click Save skill.
ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, ...
Copy universal-prompt.md into your first message. No install, no file upload.
Use it
I'm starting a new side project — a CLI tool for renaming photo batches. Let's plan it out before we write anything.
Set up a project journal for everything we've built so far, and keep it updated from now on.
Open the project journal and tell me where we left off.
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, with evidence each source is independently reputable and not just a top search result, in research.md. This repo runs its own Step 6: two weekly GitHub Actions — check-links and reference-review — keep the list honest.
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