Planner Agent

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

Version history

  • Introduced in GitLab 18.6.
  • Create and edit features introduced in GitLab 18.7.

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 576622.

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 epic's progress: (insert URL)"
  • "Draft a memo for this initiative (insert URL) including objectives, success criteria, and key stakeholders."
  • "What tasks are needed to implement this user story?"
  • "Draft a technical requirements issue for this (insert URL) including API needs, data models, and integration points."
  • "What issues have missed their due dates?"
  • "Write a dependency map narrative in an issue explaining the relationships and sequencing between these epics: (insert URLs)."
  • "Find stale issues that haven't been updated in 6 months."
  • "Create issues for the tasks needed to implement dark mode: design tokens, component updates, user preference storage, and toggle UI. Tag them all with dark-mode label."
  • "Identify duplicate or similar issues in this project."
  • "Create a bug issue for the payment gateway timeout problem. This blocks our checkout flow and should be high priority with the critical label."
  • "Break down this initiative (insert URL) into key features we need to deliver."
  • "Create a feature request issue: users want to export their data as CSV. Include acceptance criteria: supports all data types, includes headers, and respects user permissions."
  • "How should we sequence the features in this initiative? (insert URL)?"
  • "Create a technical debt epic for database optimization. Update all existing issues with 'performance' and 'database' labels to link to this new epic."
  • "What work should we defer in this epic (insert URL) to reduce scope?"
  • "Close this epic (insert URL) as completed. Create a new retrospective issue documenting what went well and what needs improvement, and link it to the closed epic."
  • "Suggest how to organize these 20 issues (insert filter criteria) across Q1 sprints."
  • "Show work items assigned to me."
  • "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."