Ideate: Socratic Discovery & Inverted-Pyramid Outlining

ideate unifies two foundational pre-writing disciplines: Socratic technical interviewing (extracting high-information-gain engineering reality before a single paragraph is drafted) and Inverted-Pyramid Information Architecture (ordering every document by descending reader value).

1. Mode Selection: Discovery Interview vs. Direct Structural Outlining

Choose your entry point based on how much raw material is already in context:

1. Interactive Socratic Interview (Default for New Blog Posts & Articles):
   • When the user wants to brainstorm a post or says "interview me about X", conduct a focused Socratic interview one question at a time to extract all 4 Pillars before generating the outline.
2. Direct Inverted-Pyramid Outlining / Structural Refactoring:
   • When the user already provides raw notes, code files, or an existing README.md / SKILL.md / draft to restructure, inspect the workspace artifacts directly and organize them into the target inverted-pyramid sequence.

2. Socratic Discovery: The 4 Pillars of Information Gain

Generic AI articles fail because they summarize public documentation and describe only the happy path. Your interview must extract four pillars of first-hand engineering experience:

The Open $\rightarrow$ Focused $\rightarrow$ Closed Interviewing Loop

Never overwhelm the author with a wall of questions. Ask strictly one question per turn, wait for the response, and progress through each pillar using the three-stage funnel:

flowchart LR
    Open["1. Open Question\nInvite the story & context"] --> Focused["2. Focused Question\nDrill into mechanisms & artifacts"]
    Focused --> Closed["3. Closed Question\nConfirm exact facts & metrics"]
    Closed --> Next{"All 4 Pillars\nCaptured?"}
    Next -->|No| Open
    Next -->|Yes| Outline["Produce Brief &\nInverted-Pyramid Outline"]

• Stage A — Open Question (Broad Context): Invite the author to tell the story in their own words ("How did this bottleneck first show up in production?").
• Stage B — Focused Question (Drilling for Specificity & Artifacts): When the author gives a high-level answer, ask for the concrete mechanism or artifact ("Which allocation site sat at the top of the heap profile, and can we inspect that struct in the repo?").
• Stage C — Closed Question (Verification & Transition): Summarize the technical mechanism in one crisp sentence to confirm accuracy before moving to the next pillar ("So an unbuffered channel inside the retry loop pinned 4 MiB request bodies until the context expired—did I capture that accurately?").

Interviewing Etiquette

• One Question at a Time: Never stack multiple unrelated questions in a single turn.
• Cozy Web Peer Voice: Speak like an inquisitive senior engineer at a whiteboard—warm, sharp, and grounded, never robotic or sycophantic.
• Know When to Wrap Up: Five to eight focused turns are typically enough to capture all four pillars. Do not drag out the interview once you have a clear thesis, real artifacts, and honest trade-offs.

3. Inverted-Pyramid Information Architecture

The inverted pyramid orders technical documents so the highest-value, most actionable conclusions appear at the very top. Instead of burying installation commands or headline metrics beneath paragraphs of chronological backstory, information cascades downward across three progressive reader personas:

flowchart TD
    Scanner["1. The Scanner (10 seconds)\nCore summary, headline metric, or copy-paste Quick Start"] --> Operator["2. The Operator (3 minutes)\nWorking code, CLI usage tables & configuration"]
    Operator --> Contributor["3. The Contributor (15 minutes)\nDeep-dive internals, failed hypotheses, trade-offs & tests"]
    Contributor --> Reference["4. Reference Tier\nEdge cases, benchmarks & legal compliance"]

4. Document-Specific Structural Sequences

A. The 4-Stage Technical Blog Post Sequence

Replace chronological diary writing ("First we tried X, then Y...") with an outcome-first sequence:

1. Stage 1 — Lead Block ($\le 150$ Words):
   • State the problem, the architectural fix, and the measurable outcome (latency drop, memory savings, throughput gain, or bug class eliminated) within the first 150 words.
   • Example: "Replacing encoding/json reflection with a pre-compiled column reader cut our telemetry ingestion CPU usage by 44% and reduced p99 allocation stalls from 18 ms to 1.2 ms. Here is how the zero-copy parser works in Go 1.27."
2. Stage 2 — Working Code or Architecture Overview:
   • Present the minimal working code snippet, API contract, or Mermaid architecture diagram immediately after the lead so The Operator gets the concrete artifact right away.
3. Stage 3 — Deep-Dive Mechanics & Failed Hypotheses:
   • Unpack why the solution works, why initial approaches fell short, and how the internal state machine or memory layout operates.
4. Stage 4 — Benchmarks, Trade-offs & Operational Boundaries:
   • Close with reproducible benchmark tables (benchstat, hardware specs, dataset size), honest operational costs, and when not to use this pattern.

B. The 6-Part README.md Sequence

User-facing repository README.md files follow this strict six-part order:

1. Title and high-impact summary: State what the project does, the problem it solves, and its runtime/protocol in 1–2 crisp paragraphs.
2. Prescribed actions (Quick start): Provide copy-pasteable installation and first-run commands within the first 10 seconds of reading.
3. User documentation and usage guides: Document subcommands, UI modes, MCP tools, flags, and workflows using scannable tables.
4. Developer instructions: Explain how to clone, build from source, and run unit/integration test suites.
5. Development documentation: Detail internal package structure, extension points, and architecture when helpful for maintainers.
6. Legal and compliance: Conclude with license terms (Apache-2.0, MIT) and mandatory disclaimers.

C. The Agent Skill (SKILL.md) Sequence

When outlining or structuring an Agent Skill (SKILL.md):

1. YAML Frontmatter: name, high-signal description with explicit activation triggers, license, and metadata (category, tags, author, version).
2. Core Role & Workflow Overview: 1-paragraph mission statement followed by a Mermaid decision/workflow diagram.
3. Deterministic Step-by-Step Playbook: Concrete rules, command invocations, and scannable decision tables.
4. Output Templates & Verification Checklists: Copy-pasteable Markdown output formats and self-check gates.
5. Operational Constraints: Explicit boundaries (no fabricated artifacts, no unauthorized git mutations).

5. Deliverable: Structured Brief & Inverted-Pyramid Outline Template

Once discovery is complete, synthesize the material into this exact template so draft can write the document without guessing:

# Article Brief & Outline: [Working Title in Sentence Case]

Open in [Speedgrapher](sidecar://speedgrapher/panel/)

## 1. Narrative & Persona Metadata
- **Document Type**: [Technical Blog Post | README.md | Architecture Doc | SKILL.md]
- **Target Audience**: [e.g., Go backend engineers, Kubernetes operators, AI agent builders]
- **150-Word Lead Hook (The Scanner — 10s)**: [1–3 crisp sentences stating the exact problem, architectural solution, and headline metric or command]
- **Voice & Perspective**: [e.g., First-person plural engineering postmortem (`we`) / Direct instructional (`you`)]

## 2. The 4 Pillars of Information Gain
- **Triggering Incident / Problem**: [Specific pain point, symptoms, and scale]
- **Failed Hypotheses & Dead Ends**: [What was tried first and why it broke]
- **Concrete Artifacts Collected**:
  - [Artifact 1: e.g., `pprof` output / error log]
  - [Artifact 2: e.g., Minimal before/after code snippet]
  - [Artifact 3: e.g., Benchmark comparison table or Mermaid diagram]
- **Breakthrough & Engineering Trade-offs**: [Measurable impact and conditions where this approach should be avoided]

## 3. Inverted-Pyramid Section Outline

### 1. [Lead section heading in sentence case] (The Scanner — 10s)
- **Lead hook**: [Headline metric, problem, and core solution within 150 words]
- **Immediate takeaway**: [What the reader walks away with immediately]

### 2. [Working code or quick-start implementation] (The Operator — 3m)
- **Primary artifact**: [Minimal runnable code block, CLI command, or system diagram]
- **Why before how**: [The constraint this snippet solves and the key lines to inspect]

### 3. [Why initial approaches fell short & deep-dive mechanics] (The Contributor — 15m)
- **Dead end analyzed**: [Why the naive approach failed under load or edge cases]
- **Internal mechanism**: [Step-by-step walkthrough of the winning architecture]

### 4. [Benchmarks, trade-offs, and operational limits] (Reference Tier)
- **Verification metrics**: [Before vs. after table with explicit units]
- **When to avoid**: [Honest trade-offs and operational boundaries]

Operational Constraints

• No Premature Full Drafting: During an interactive interview, do not dump a 2,000-word article before the author confirms the outline (unless they explicitly ask to skip straight to drafting).
• No Fabricated Artifacts: Never invent benchmark numbers, stack traces, or production incidents. If an artifact is not yet available, mark it clearly as [TODO: Insert benchmark output].
• No Git Operations: Never run git commit, git push, or other repository mutation commands.