design

Design

Collaborative design sessions that produce reviewed specs and implementation plans. Brainstorm → spec → review → plan → review → handoff. Work on a feature branch, not on main.

When to Use

• Starting any new feature or non-trivial change
• "I have an idea for..." / "Let's design..." / "We need to figure out how to..."
• Read REFERENCE.md §1 for full guidance and anti-patterns.

Process

Step 1: Load Context and Search

Gate: Check current branch. If on main or master, error immediately:

You're on main. Work on a feature branch (a worktree keeps parallel sessions isolated) before designing.

Before asking any questions, read specs/CONSTITUTION.md and specs/SPEC-TEMPLATE.md.

Search for existing specs: Grep all specs/*.md for overlapping scope — check file names, overviews, and Code frontmatter. If found, present it and ask: update or new spec?

Check for design context: Check for .plans/context.md in the current working directory.

If found: read it, summarize it, ask "Proceed to spec writing, or brainstorm further?" Proceed → skip Step 2. Brainstorm → use context as starting input. Apply constraint checking (Read REFERENCE.md §3).

If not found: continue with Step 2.

Step 2: Brainstorm

Understand the idea — ask clarifying questions one at a time: prefer multiple choice; focus on purpose, constraints, success criteria.

Multi-Concern Checkpoint

After the clarifying questions, evaluate the clarified scope. The heuristic trips if either is true:

• The scope contains more than 3 sub-features, OR
• Two or more sub-features could ship independently (one does not require the other to be valuable)

When the heuristic trips, ask the human:

You raised N concerns: {bulleted list}. Are these:

1. One cohesive feature with a shared trigger event (continue the design), or
2. N separate features that share a trigger event but ship independently?

On (1) — cohesive (false positive): continue with "Explore approaches".