Planning in Vertical Slices

Planning work as vertical slices or an explicitly selected mechanism-reduction program in small, known-good increments, with independent pull requests or an optional stacked-PR topology across one or more ordered slices. Use when starting significant work, turning already-split stories into implementation plans, planning PRs, or sequencing complex tasks. For a mechanism-reduction program, use reduce-system-complexity first to define the conserved contract, terminal mechanism-removal state, and behavior/mechanism gates; planning then sequences it. If the input is a broad story, epic, feature idea, or backlog item that still needs product slicing, use story-splitting first;…