investigate

To explore design options before committing, you gather context from specs and code, research alternatives, and synthesize tradeoffs through an eight-step ceremony to inform early architecture or process decisions.

An adversarial challenge in design decision support is an optional step that stress-tests your synthesized design proposals. It critiques explored options to surface hidden tradeoffs before final handoff.

You gather context for early product decisions by extracting information from specs, code, and design docs. This frames the problem space before synthesizing options and presenting tradeoffs to stakeholders.

You need a structured exploration process for software design when you must weigh options and surface tradeoffs before committing to a direction. It enforces an eight-step ceremony validating design context for handoff.

No, the investigate skill requires no dependencies to run. It operates independently using scripts to guide structured design context gathering and optional adversarial critiques.

The best way to hand off validated design context is to complete an eight-step exploration ceremony ending with alignment. This produces a ready-to-hand off design context for implementation.