Brainstorm

Brainstorm — Ideation & Decision Capture

An opinionated interactive dialogue, run at any pipeline boundary, for structured ideation and decision capture — not template-filling. It surfaces contradictions, dependencies, cost concerns, and untested assumptions through conversation.

Process

1. Deep context load (before saying anything substantive): project-state.md, the constitution, design docs, any existing spec.md, the prior brainstorm-log.md, and approvals/master.json to fix the pipeline position.
2. Open with 3–5 sharp, categorized observations, each tagged:
   • Contradiction — conflicts with an existing decision
   • Missing Piece — a gap in current thinking
   • Cost Concern — more expensive than it looks
   • Untested Assumption — taken for granted without evidence
   • Cross-Feature Dependency — touches another feature --boundary <phase> scopes the observations to the upcoming phase (e.g. --boundary micro).
3. Dialogue — challenge assumptions, propose alternatives, reference the constitution and prior decisions, flag scope creep against the spec tier. No monologues, no reflexive agreement.
4. Convergence detection — explicit ("capture this", "lock it in") or prompted once the exchange shifts from exploring to refining.
5. Capture the session record (only after explicit confirmation): create the feature branch and directory if needed, append a session block to brainstorm-log.md, commit (brainstorm: {feature}), update project-state.md.

Brainstorm log block

# Brainstorm Session: {date} — {boundary or topic}

## Observations
1. **{Category}:** {observation}

## Decisions
### {Topic}
- {Decision point}: {what was decided}    # numbered D-NNN

## Brainstorm Capture
{Insights that emerged — cross-spec observations, design improvements,
things that affect other features or future specs.}
- {Insight}

## Scope Tier
{patch|feature|epic} — {reasoning}

--tier {patch|feature|epic} sets proportional ceremony and persists to /genesis-accept.