spec-ideate

Turn a rough product ask into a requirements.md under specs/NNN_feature_slug/. This is step 1 of the spec-driven workflow: spec-ideate → spec-tasks → spec-build.

When to use

Invoke when the user wants to start a new feature, capture requirements, or "ideate" on a product idea. The input is a product idea for planning purposes — not an implementation request.

Procedure

1. Grill first. Apply the grilling skill to interrogate the idea: ask one question at a time, wait for each answer, and give a recommended answer per question. Look up facts in the codebase yourself; only put genuine product decisions to the user. Continue until you reach a shared understanding of the product ask.
2. Compute the next number. List specs/, find the highest existing NNN_* directory, add one, zero-pad to three digits. Numbers are never reused — even if a feature was abandoned, do not fill its slot.
3. Derive the slug. NNN_feature_slug — snake_case, ASCII only, drop punctuation.
4. Write the file at specs/NNN_feature_slug/requirements.md using the canonical structure below.
5. Seed the index. Append a row to the table in specs/README.md with Status: Draft and today's date.
6. Format. Run deno fmt specs/NNN_feature_slug/requirements.md specs/README.md.
7. Report back with the new path, and suggest running spec-tasks to break it into deliverable tasks.

Canonical requirements.md structure

Produce a file matching this shape (the leading # is the title, not a section break):

# {Feature title}

**Status:** Draft | **Created:** {YYYY-MM-DD}

## Problem / product ask

{What we're building and why — the user-facing outcome.}

## Users & goals

{Who benefits and what they achieve.}

## Requirements

- {functional requirements — what the feature must do}

## Non-goals / out of scope

- {explicit exclusions to keep scope tight}

## Acceptance criteria

- {observable, testable conditions that define "done"}

## Open questions

- {anything grilling could not resolve — or "none"}

Conventions to honour

• Zero-padded, never-reused feature NNN (same rule as new-adr).
• Filenames and directory names are snake_case (project-wide convention).
• Use the bold metadata line under the title (house style), not YAML frontmatter, inside the spec body.
• requirements.md is the relatively stable source of truth — later skills read from it rather than rewriting it.

Out of scope

• Splitting into tasks (that's spec-tasks) or writing any implementation code (that's spec-build).