Brainstorming

# Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs

Help turn ideas into fully formed designs and specs through natural collaborative dialogue.

Start by classifying how much process the request needs, then work through your path: understand the context, refine the idea, present a design, and get your human partner's approval.

## Establish Shared Understanding

The outcome of brainstorming is an understanding your human partner can recognize and correct, grounded in what they want to accomplish.

1. **Discover intent.** Use the request and available context to identify the intended outcome, who it is for, and what success looks like. When that information is missing, ask one focused question about purpose or intended use before proposing features or an approach. Knowing the app genre does not tell you why your partner wants it. Gathering missing requirements does not ask them to authorize the task again. 2. **Write back your understanding.** Summarize the intended outcome, relevant constraints, and success criteria in a short note your partner can assess. Separate what they said from assumptions. Invite correction and incorporate their answer before treating this as the design brief. 3. **Carry intent into the design.** Preserve the agreed understanding in the selected path's design artifact: the written spec for architectural work, or the in-chat design/probe for bounded work and spikes. Check proposed features and technical choices against that understanding.

When the request already supplies the purpose and constraints, reflect that understanding instead of asking the same questions again. Keep the note concise; its accuracy and the opportunity to correct it matter.

<HARD-GATE> Before taking any implementation action, including invoking an implementation skill, writing product code, scaffolding, installing product dependencies, or creating an external project, complete the selected path's prerequisites:

- Spike: the human partner approves the question and probe. - Bounded: the human partner approves the short in-chat design. - Architectural: the human partner reviews and approves the written spec, then reviews the written implementation plan and selects its execution method. Conversational design approval only permits writing the spec; written-spec approval only permits invoking writing-plans.

A reply approves the stage actually presented. Approval of an idea or feature scope does not approve artifacts that do not exist yet. Resume at the earliest incomplete stage; do not turn one approval into permission to skip the rest of the selected path. Read-only project exploration is allowed while those prerequisites remain incomplete. </HARD-GATE>

## Three Paths

Before your first question, classify the request and say the classification out loud — "this looks bounded, so I'll present a short design here rather than write a spec" — so your human partner can override it:

- **Spike** — a feasibility question ("can we...", "is it possible...", "quick and dirty is fine") whose output is an answer, not code you keep. Present the question and what you'll try in 2-3 sentences, get a nod, then find out as cheaply as correctness allows. No design doc, no spec file. Report findings as a recommendation; anything you built stays labeled throwaway. - **Bounded** — a well-scoped change to code that already exists in this repo: a new flag, a small endpoint, a one-file fix. Understanding the kind of app is not enough — bounded means the flow you are changing is already here to read. If there is no existing flow to change, the task is not bounded. Ask the clarifying questions that matter, present a short design IN CHAT (a few sentences to a few short paragraphs), and STOP. Implementation starts only after your human partner says yes to that design — a bounded task's approval is as hard a gate as an architectural one. No spec file, no implementation plan document. - **Architectural** — new projects, new subsystems, changes that restructure how components fit together or alter interfaces others depend on. Follow the full process: questions, approaches, sectioned design, written spec, then the writing-plans skill.

When in doubt between two paths, take the heavier one. The ratchet is one-way: hidden complexity discovered mid-task upgrades the path — stop, say so, and step up. Nothing downgrades mid-task.

## Anti-Pattern: "Too Simple To Need Approval"

Every path ends with your human partner approving the required design before implementation. A bounded change may need only two sentences in chat. A new todo-list project is architectural and requires the written spec and planning handoffs. Scale the artifact to the selected path; complete that path's reviews before implementation.

## Red Flags

| Thought | Reality | |---------|---------| | "This is too simple to need a design" | Follow the selected path: a bounded change gets a short chat design; an architectural cha