Brainstorming & Ideating Concepts Into Designs

This skill orchestrates requirements exploration, consumer tension mining, structural ideation, and multi-axis evaluation before implementation.

1. Phase Router

Determine the active phase from conversation context:

• Phase 1: INTAKE: New brief, feature request, "come up with", or initiating conceptual design.
• Phase 2: INSIGHT: "Find an insight", tension discovery, or possessing raw requirements without underlying rationale.
• Phase 3: IDEATION: "Generate ideas", exploring alternatives, or possessing an insight needing concrete concepts.
• Phase 4: EVALUATE & REFINE: "Critique", "improve the concept", "stress-test", or scoring proposals against rubrics.
• Phase 5: ARTICULATE: "Finalize design doc", structuring specifications, or preparing persistence artifacts.
• Full Cycle (Standard Workflow): Execute sequentially: Phase 1 → Phase 2 → Phase 3 → Phase 4 → Phase 5.
  • Dynamic Bypass Rule: For straightforward engineering implementation tasks (e.g., adding a caching layer or retry flag), dynamically bypass Phase 2 insight discovery and advance directly from Phase 1 to Phase 3 (proposing 2 to 3 architectural trade-offs).

2. Non-Negotiable Core Constraints

2.1 Single-Question Refinement

Never overwhelm the user or developer with multiple questions in a single response. Ask clarifying questions strictly one at a time during refinement.

2.2 Incremental Validation Blocks

Deliver architectural or creative proposals in bite-sized blocks (200 to 300 words). Pause and request explicit user validation after each block. Do not advance to subsequent design sections until the preceding block is approved.

2.3 Simplicity as Violence & YAGNI

Actively recommend pruning speculative features, configurability, or over-engineering. Enforce the clarity check: if a concept cannot be explained completely in one sentence, it is not an idea—it is a plan.

2.4 Warmup Pruning (Serial Order Effect)

Statistically, early ideas generated during an ideation cycle represent conventional warmup (obvious approaches accessible to anyone in the domain). Treat ideas 1 through 3 as conventional warmup. Deprioritize these early concepts and focus refinement on deeper directions (ideas 5 through 12+).

2.5 Competitor Swap Verification

Replace the primary product, brand, or architecture component in a proposal with a direct competitor or generic alternative. If the concept still functions identically without modification, it lacks differentiating specificity (Originality <= 5.0). Re-anchor the design in unique core capabilities.

2.6 Verifiable Falsifiability

Every proposed architectural or research alternative must include concrete, falsifiable verification criteria (e.g., runnable validation checks via native test runners, explicit test assertions, or quantitative empirical thresholds).

2.7 Plan Persistence

Write finalized, validated designs to a markdown artifact in the session's plans directory using the format YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md.

3. Phase Execution Modules

For comprehensive methodologies, mining prompts, and scoring rubrics, consult the L2 reference modules on demand:

• For Phase 2 (Insight Discovery & Tensions): Read references/insight-and-tensions.md (covers Mark Pollard's Four Points, Jobs-to-be-Done analysis, Cultural/Category/Human tension spotting, How-Might-We laddering, and canonical insight formulas).
• For Phase 3 (Ideation & Triplet Generation): Read references/ideation-methods.md (covers triplet method selection across Structural, Collision, and Perturbation categories, warmup pruning, and system architecture idioms). When ideas must be genuinely novel rather than competent variations, also read references/novel-ideation.md (covers anti-convergence techniques: average purge, bisociative domain collision, constraint inversion, temporal retrieval, adversarial stress testing, and specificity checks to defeat LLM mode collapse).
• For Phase 4 (Evaluation & Stress-Testing Rubrics): Read references/evaluation-rubric.md (covers Brief Compliance pass/fail gates, 6-Criteria multi-axis scoring, Competitor Swap verification, and Kill Your Darlings stress-testing).

4. Upstream Attribution & Documentation

For complete upstream attribution, cognitive provenance, and links to all source repositories, read README.md.