Planning with the planner
=========================

Planning is where a human is expected to be present. You describe what
you want; the **planner agent** — a product and project manager for one
project — turns it into a plan (:doc:`/concepts/workflow`).

Chats
-----

Open **Planner** on the project page and start a chat with a topic. Talk
to it as to a colleague: the goal, constraints, what is out of scope. The
planner can

- read the project's milestones, epics and tickets and search them;
- search and read the organization's knowledge base, and write documents and
  decisions into it;
- read the project's skills, to plan work that fits its process;
- propose **changesets**.

Chats are kept and listed on the *Planner* page, so you can come back to
one later. Long chats are summarized automatically so they stay within the
model's context (:doc:`/reference/planner`).

Changesets
----------

The planner never changes the plan silently. It proposes a changeset — a
list of operations: create a milestone, epic or ticket, update an item,
add a dependency — that shows in the chat as a card.

.. figure:: /_static/screenshots/changeset.png
   :alt: A changeset card with one checkbox per operation and Approve and Reject buttons.

   A proposed changeset.

- **Approve all** applies every operation; or untick some and **Approve
  selected**. Operations that refer to items created in the same
  changeset need those approved too.
- **Reject** discards it; tell the planner why and it proposes another.
- Approved operations are applied together, atomically.

*Changesets* on the project page lists every changeset, including those
Ballet proposes itself — for example a bug ticket after you reject an
agent's assumption on a finished ticket.

The planner may suggest how autonomously a ticket should run, but only a
human sets a ticket's policy.

Good tickets
------------

Agents do best with tickets that are small, independently testable and
have clear **acceptance criteria**; the planner is instructed to cut work
that way. Dependencies (*A blocks B*) let Ballet run everything else in
parallel and hold only what must wait (:doc:`/concepts/scheduling`).
You can always add or edit tickets by hand on the board.