Render a plan for human review

Use this workflow after writing an MDX plan file containing Markdown and built-in components and before acting on it.

Prerequisite

Confirm that Node.js 22 or newer is available.

node --version

Read the guidance

Before writing the plan, run:

npx -y big-plan@latest guidance

It prints the plan-writing principles and unlocks validate, render, and review for the working directory for 24 hours. All three commands fail with GUIDANCE_REQUIRED until it has been run.

Validate while authoring

Use npx -y big-plan@latest validate <plan.mdx> as the correction loop while writing. Rendering enforces the same linting rules, so validate until clean before handing anything to a human.

Render the review document

From the working directory that contains the plan path, run:

npx -y big-plan@latest render <plan.mdx>

Replace <plan.mdx> with the actual path to the plan. For example:

npx -y big-plan@latest render plans/implementation.mdx

The command creates plans/implementation.html next to the source plan. Give the human reviewer that HTML path as a full absolute path or file:// URL and wait for agreement before acting on the plan.

To choose a different location, pass it as the second argument:

npx -y big-plan@latest render plans/implementation.mdx reviews/implementation.html

The command creates missing parent directories for that output path.