PlanExe

Planning complex projects should not require a consulting-firm budget.

Important

PlanExe v2 is here, and it is better than v1. This repository is PlanExe v1. For new plans, use PlanExe2.

Turn a complex project brief into an editable planning baseline in roughly 65–90 minutes.

PlanExe v2  |  See example plans

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Why PlanExe exists

Good ideas are not limited to people and organizations that can afford a large consulting engagement. Turning an ambitious idea into a coherent project, however, normally requires substantial time, specialist knowledge, stakeholder interviews, and repeated synthesis.

PlanExe is open-source software for people and AI agents that need to plan complex projects. Describe a project in plain language and PlanExe creates a structured first-pass plan: the assumptions to challenge, decisions to make, work to coordinate, risks to investigate, and questions that must be answered before execution.

The result is not a substitute for stakeholder participation or professional sign-off. It is a way to begin with a broad, inspectable planning baseline instead of a blank page.

What PlanExe does

PlanExe examines a project from several planning perspectives and combines the results into one self-contained interactive report. Depending on the project, the output commonly includes:

• Executive summary and project purpose
• Assumptions, constraints, and unanswered questions
• Strategic choices and alternative scenarios
• Work breakdown structure and dependency-aware Gantt chart
• Governance bodies, decision rights, and escalation paths
• Roles, stakeholders, and engagement approaches
• Risk register, SWOT analysis, and mitigation proposals
• Premortem, expert criticism, premise attack, and self-audit
• Documents to create, documents to find, and data to collect
• An editable bundle of Markdown, JSON, and CSV source artifacts

PlanExe v2 runs on your own machine and makes its model calls through the Claude Code CLI, using your Claude subscription.

Built for complex projects

PlanExe is intended for consulting-scale, multi-phase initiatives—not everyday task lists or small personal projects.

Examples of suitable work include:

• Planning a regional clean-water, energy, or transport infrastructure program
• Coordinating a regulated healthcare or financial-services transformation
• Designing a cross-border public-sector initiative
• Preparing a complex business, industrial, or technology program
• Structuring an ERP migration, corporate separation, or post-merger integration
• Helping an under-resourced organization develop an ambitious proposal before it has access to specialist advisers

The richer the brief—objective, location, constraints, stakeholders, resources, timeline, and success criteria—the more useful the resulting plan becomes.

A plan you can inspect and change

PlanExe does not hide the planning process inside a chat transcript. Each run produces a folder of readable source artifacts alongside the final report.

If you find an assumption or early decision you disagree with, you can edit that artifact and continue the plan from there. PlanExe rebuilds the later work that depends on your change while preserving earlier work you already accept. This makes it possible to refine the reasoning behind a plan, not merely rewrite its final prose.

What PlanExe does not replace

PlanExe creates a draft for investigation and refinement. Generated claims, budgets, dates, laws, engineering assumptions, and risk estimates may be wrong or incomplete. Important projects still require:

• Evidence and current local data
• Stakeholder interviews and negotiation
• Domain experts and professional judgment
• Legal, financial, medical, safety, or engineering review where applicable
• Named people who take responsibility for decisions and execution

Use the report to expose assumptions, focus conversations, and accelerate planning—not as proof that a project is safe, feasible, funded, or approved.

See a plan, then generate one

1. Browse plans generated by PlanExe and open any report that interests you.
2. Generate your own plan with PlanExe v2.

Why run PlanExe on your own machine?

PlanExe v2 is a small Python program that you clone and run yourself. There is no hosted service and no PlanExe account. Running it locally lets you:

• Keep every generated plan as files on your own disk
• Edit any intermediate file and regenerate only the work that depends on it
• Resume an interrupted run without repeating the work already finished
• Read the log of every prompt and response behind the report
• Get started with nothing more than Python 3.11 and the Claude Code CLI

PlanExe v2 sends your project brief and the intermediate planning material to Anthropic through the Claude Code CLI. Do not use it for material that must not leave systems you control.

Running PlanExe yourself does not remove your legal, ethical, security, or professional responsibilities.

For setup instructions, see the PlanExe v2 repository.