Planner Agent

The Planner Agent is a specialized AI agent that assists with product management and planning workflows in GitLab. It helps you organize, prioritize, and track work more effectively because it combines:

• Product management expertise.
• Awareness of GitLab planning objects, like issues and epics.

Use the Planner Agent when you need help with:

• Prioritization: Applying frameworks like RICE, MoSCoW, or WSJF to rank work items.
• Work breakdown: Decomposing initiatives into epics, features, and user stories.
• Dependency analysis: Identifying blocked work and understanding relationships between items.
• Planning sessions: Organizing sprints, milestones, or quarterly planning.
• Status reporting: Generating summaries of progress, risks, and blockers.
• Backlog management: Identifying stale issues, duplicates, or items needing refinement.
• Estimation: Suggesting relative sizing or effort estimates for work items.

Please leave feedback in issue 576622.

Access the Planner Agent

Prerequisites:

• You must be working in a project, not a group.
• Foundational agents must be turned on.
• During the beta, the Planner Agent is in read-only mode.

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.

   If you’ve turned the new navigation on, this field is on the top bar.

2. Open an issue, epic, or merge request in your project.

3. Open GitLab Duo Chat:

   New navigation

   On the GitLab Duo sidebar, select either New GitLab Duo Chat ( ) or Current GitLab Duo Chat ( ).

   A Chat conversation opens in the GitLab Duo sidebar on the right side of your screen.

   Classic navigation

   In the upper-right corner, select Open GitLab Duo Chat ( ). A drawer opens on the right side of your screen.

4. From the New chat ( ) dropdown list, select Planner.

5. Enter your planning-related question or request. To get the best results from your request:

   • Provide context about your request, like URLs, filter criteria, or scope.
   • If you have a preferred prioritization framework, specify it.
   • If the agent’s assumptions don’t match your workflow, ask for clarification.

Example prompts

• “Generate an executive summary of this epic’s progress: (insert URL)”
• “What tasks are needed to implement this user story?”
• “What issues have missed their due dates?”
• “Find stale issues that haven’t been updated in 6 months.”
• “Identify duplicate or similar issues in this project.”
• “Break down this initiative (insert URL) into key features we need to deliver.”
• “How should we sequence the features in this initiative? (insert URL)?”
• “What work should we defer in this epic (insert URL) to reduce scope?”
• “Suggest how to organize these 20 issues (insert filter criteria) across Q1 sprints.”
• “Summarize blockers and mitigation plans for leadership: (insert URL)”
• “Which of the bugs with a “boards” label should we fix first, considering user impact?”
• “Group these issues into logical release themes: (insert URL)”
• “Identify which features are required for version 1, and which are optional, and explain why: (insert URL)”
• “Rank these epics by strategic value for Q1.”
• “Suggest a phased approach for this project: (insert URL)”
• “Help me prioritize issues in my backlog with the label (insert label name) by using the RICE framework.”
• “Which child items on this epic should I remove from the current scope to meet the deadline?”
• “What would be the MVP version of this feature? (insert URL)”
• “Help me prioritize technical debt against new features.”
• “Compare these features (insert URLs) using an effort versus impact matrix.”
• “Use MoSCoW to categorize features with the criteria (insert criteria) based on customer impact.”