brainstorming

To turn ideas into approved software design specifications, this skill guides you through sequential clarifying questions, presents 2-3 viable approaches with trade-offs, and writes a design doc to docs/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md for user approval before any implementation begins.

The best way to clarify requirements and success criteria for a new feature is through guided design discovery that explores project context, constraints, and recent commits, then asks clarifying questions one at a time until the team understands what to build.

You prevent wasted implementation work on ambiguous component building or configuration changes by enforcing a hard gate that blocks implementation actions until a design is presented, the user approves each section, and a spec is written and committed.

You cannot start coding before the design specification is fully approved. The skill enforces a hard gate blocking all implementation skills until the user approves the design, at which point it invokes writing-plans to proceed.

Yes, this approach presents 2-3 viable design options with trade-offs, recommends one, and refines the decision collaboratively before performing a self-review and routing the spec for user approval.

You need to write design documentation to docs/specs/ for architecture changes whenever requirements need clarification and success criteria must be validated, ensuring a spec is written and committed before invoking writing-plans.