brainstorming

To turn an ambiguous engineering idea into a validated architecture design, this skill explores project context, asks batched clarifying questions, and proposes 2-3 approaches with trade-offs. It requires explicit user approval before saving the final specification design doc.

The best way to gather requirements and propose trade-offs is through an approval-gated workflow that groups up to four related clarifying questions by theme. This ensures constraints and success criteria are clarified before recommending a specific engineering planning direction.

Yes, the requirements gathering process integrates with existing project files and recent commits. It performs context exploration to review the current project state, ensuring the specification design and architecture proposals are grounded in your actual codebase reality.

To document a feature design and transition to writing plans, the skill saves a validated design doc into docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md and commits it. After user approval, it explicitly transitions to the writing-plans skill for implementation.

Yes, you can revise architecture proposals section-by-section during the design approval workflow. The skill presents the design incrementally and pauses for confirmation at user approval checkpoints, allowing you to request revisions before the final design doc is saved.

You should not use a structured specification design workflow for feature development when requirements are already fully defined or for trivial changes. It is specifically built for ambiguous modification requests where constraints must be clarified to prevent wasted implementation work.