Planner Agent

  • Tier: Premium, Ultimate
  • Add-on: GitLab Duo Core, Pro, or Enterprise
  • Offering: GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed

Version history

The Planner Agent is a specialized AI agent that assists with product management and planning workflows in GitLab. It helps you create, 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.
  • Create: Drafting memos or creating objects to provide value.
  • Dependency analysis: Identifying blocked work and understanding relationships between items.
  • Edit: Editing existing objects to save time and improve efficiency.
  • 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 583008.

Access the Planner Agent

Prerequisites:

  1. On the top bar, select Search or go to and find your project or group.

  2. Open an issue, epic, or merge request.

  3. On the GitLab Duo sidebar, select either New GitLab Duo Chat ({pencil-square}) or Current GitLab Duo Chat ({duo-chat}).

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

  4. From the New chat ({duo-chat-new}) 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 work items progress: (insert URL)"
  • "Draft a memo for this work item (insert URL) including objectives, success criteria, and key stakeholders."
  • "What tasks are needed to implement this work item?"
  • "Draft a technical requirements work item for this (insert URL) including API needs, data models, and integration points."
  • "What work items have missed their due dates?"
  • "Write a dependency map narrative in an work item explaining the relationships and sequencing between these work items: (insert URLs)."
  • "Find stale work items that haven't been updated in 6 months."
  • "Identify duplicate or similar work items in this project."
  • "Break down this initiative (insert URL) into key features we need to deliver."
  • "How should we sequence the features in this work item? (insert URL)?"
  • "What work should we defer in this work item (insert URL) to reduce scope?"
  • "Close this work item (insert URL) as completed. Create a new retrospective work item documenting what went well and what needs improvement, and link it to the closed work item."
  • "Show work items assigned to me."
  • "Summarize blockers and mitigation plans for leadership: (insert URL)"
  • "Group these work items into logical release themes: (insert URL)"
  • "Rank these work items by strategic value for Q1."
  • "Suggest a phased approach for this project: (insert URL)"
  • "Help me prioritize work items in my backlog with the label (insert label name) by using the RICE framework."
  • "Which child items on this work item 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."