design-tree

Design Tree — decide by branching, not by marching

Design isn't a straight line from question to answer. It's a tree: each decision point is a node with multiple branches; you pick one, sometimes backtrack, and move forward. The genealogy of what you chose and what you didn't is the record that keeps decisions from getting silently relitigated later, and that lets you backtrack to a real fork when a downstream choice invalidates an earlier one.

This skill makes you design that way: interview first to confirm you're solving the right problem, then expose the real decision points, enumerate genuine alternatives, record the chosen branch with its rationale, and preserve the rejected branches with the reasons they lost.

How to apply this

Before mapping any decision, interview the user. Before branching, before enumerating anything — ask. A few sharp, targeted questions about intent, constraints, success criteria, and non-goals are the highest-leverage work in any design task. Designing the right problem is worth more than any number of well-reasoned branches on the wrong one.

When planning or designing an approach, run through this in sequence: interview → load applicable standards → find decision points → enumerate alternatives → record choices and rationale → emit the tree. When invoked directly as /sonu:design-tree, apply it to $ARGUMENTS — the text typed after the invocation; if that token appears literally or is empty, apply it to the current design, plan, or discussion in context; and if the intent is to design AND implement end-to-end, run /sonu:build instead — it runs this methodology as its design gate, then builds test-first and self-reviews. When in plan mode, write the tree into the plan file's ## Design Tree section; otherwise print it in-chat.

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1. Interview first — confirm the problem before solving it

This is the highest-leverage step. Ask before you branch. The goal is a shared understanding of what you're designing: intent, constraints, success criteria, and non-goals. A few sharp questions up front save context, tokens, and the headache of treeing the wrong thing.