I'm going to push back before producing what you asked for, because the request violates the Iron Law that governs this skill library.

## The problem

You asked me to add guidance to a skill. The Iron Law says:

```
NO SKILL WITHOUT A FAILING TEST FIRST
```

> This applies to NEW skills AND EDITS to existing skills.
> Edit skill without testing? Same violation.

If I hand you "exact guidance text to add" right now, I'd be writing the edit before watching a baseline test fail. That's writing production code before the test. I won't do it that way, and the writing-skills training explicitly forbids keeping such text even "as reference."

There's also a substantive problem with the request itself. "Make plans shorter" is a guess at a solution, not a diagnosed problem. Teammates say plans are "bloated." Bloated and long are not the same thing. A 20k-character plan might be:
- Genuinely bloated (narrative, repetition, restating obvious context)
- Appropriately long (complex work that needs the detail)
- Long because the *format* invites padding

If I add "keep plans short" guidance, I might make plans worse — agents could cut necessary detail to hit a word target. I don't know what's wrong yet because I haven't watched the failure.

## What I'll do instead

I'll follow RED-GREEN-REFACTOR. Here's the verification plan first, since that's the part that must come *before* any guidance text.

### RED — establish the baseline (do this before writing anything)

1. **Collect real failing artifacts.** Get 3–5 actual 20k+ plans teammates called bloated. Don't theorize — read what's actually there.

2. **Diagnose the bloat with subagents.** For each plan, dispatch a subagent: "Here is a plan. Identify everything that is non-essential to executing the work. Categorize each: narrative/storytelling, repetition, restated context, over-specified detail, or genuinely necessary." This tells me *what kind* of length is the problem.

3. **Run the current skill cold.** Give a subagent the current writing-plans skill and a representative task. Watch it produce a plan. Does it naturally bloat? Where? Capture the verbatim structure it generates and which sections balloon. **This is the failing test** — I need to see the skill produce a bloated plan without my edit, so I know my edit addresses the real cause.

If the cold run produces a *reasonable* plan, then the skill isn't the problem — the teammates' specific plans are, or the task selection is. That changes everything.

### GREEN — write the minimal edit

Only after RED do I know what text to add. The edit targets the *specific* bloat patterns the baseline revealed — e.g., if baseline showed restated context, the guidance forbids restating context, not "be shorter."

### Verify GREEN

Re-run the same cold task with the edited skill. Compare against baseline:
- Did the bloat category I targeted shrink?
- Did the plan stay *executable*? (A subagent should be able to follow it without missing info.)
- Did length drop without losing necessary detail?

Run on 2–3 different task complexities. A simple task and a genuinely complex one — to confirm I didn't punish plans that *should* be long.

### REFACTOR

Watch for the new failure mode: agents cutting necessary detail to comply. If that appears, add an explicit counter ("shorter means removing X, never removing acceptance criteria / edge cases / ...").

## What I need from you to start

- The 3–5 actual bloated plans (or access to them)
- Confirmation of whether "bloated" means "too long" or "padded with low-value content" — ideally one teammate's annotated example

Once I have the baseline artifacts, I'll run RED and come back with the diagnosed failure and the targeted guidance text. I won't produce guidance text before then — that's the whole discipline.

Want to point me at the plans?