brainstorming

To turn rough ideas into an approved design spec, you analyze project context, clarify requirements one question at a time, compare viable approaches, and gate progression on user approval before writing a committed design document.

Preventing wasted engineering effort requires an approval-gated workflow that blocks implementation actions until a validated design spec is committed, ensuring all requirements and architecture decisions are scoped and reviewed first.

Writing a design spec for UI and non-UI changes involves incremental requirement discovery, proposing approaches with trade-offs, and validating decisions against existing project context before committing the design to a markdown file.

Yes, a hard-gate blocks implementation actions and handoff to writing-plans until the design spec passes both an inline self-review and a user review gate, ensuring validated architecture before any coding begins.

Requirements discovery for product planning includes exploring existing code and docs, asking one clarifying question at a time to uncover constraints, and defining success criteria to ground the final design spec.

Avoid using an approval-gated workflow for architecture decisions when immediate implementation is required without scoping, as the hard-gate intentionally blocks coding actions until the design spec is fully reviewed and committed.