Planning Styles

A planning style is a markdown rule file that shapes what scenarios get planned. The whole file becomes the planning approach in the agent’s prompt — written as instructions to a QA engineer on how to think about test scenarios.

Two agents use styles through the same mechanism: the web Planner and the API Chief.

Built-in Styles

Bundled style files live in rules/planner/styles/ (web) and rules/chief/styles/ (API):

Style	Intent
normal	Complete user workflows: CRUD and full commit flows that end in a data or state change
curious	Coverage gaps: mines previous test results and research to find paths earlier tests missed
psycho	Stress tests: feeds empty, invalid, and extreme values to every reachable control, then commits
hacker	API only: probes beyond the spec — hidden endpoints, undocumented fields, unprotected actions

Cycling

Each planning iteration uses the next style in the list, cycling by index.

Web Planner — default order is normal, curious, psycho. The first /plan uses normal, the second curious, the third psycho, then the cycle repeats. Override the list and order with the styles option in Planner configuration; a name may appear more than once.

API Chief — order is normal, curious, psycho, hacker. api plan cycles them the same way. api explore doesn’t cycle: it runs every style once, generating and executing a plan per style.

Selecting a Style

Force a style for a single run:

npx explorbot plan /users --style psycho        # web
npx explorbot api plan /users --style hacker    # API

The web TUI accepts the same flag: /plan --style psycho. api explore has no --style flag — it always runs all styles.

Custom Styles

Styles load from rules/<agent>/styles/<name>.md in your project first, falling back to the bundled file of the same name. To edit built-in styles, copy the bundled rules into your project:

npx explorbot extract-rules planner   # or: chief

This copies the agent’s bundled rule files (including styles) to ./rules/<agent>/, skipping files that already exist. Edit the copies — they take precedence over the bundled versions. Extract only what you want to change; anything you delete falls back to the bundled file.

Style files are plain markdown with no frontmatter. Write the mindset, the patterns to test, what counts as a test, and what to skip.

To add a new web style, create rules/planner/styles/<name>.md and add its name to the rotation:

ai: {
  agents: {
    planner: {
      styles: ['normal', 'curious', 'psycho', 'security'],
    },
  },
}

The API Chief has no styles config option — customize it by overriding the built-in style files in rules/chief/styles/.

See Also

• Planner — how web test plans are generated
• API Testing — the Chief agent and API commands
• Test Plans — the plan file format