design

Coco Design Skill

Generate a feature design from a natural language description, combining specification (what to build) and implementation planning (how to build it) into a single artifact.

When to Use

• Creating a feature design as part of the coco pipeline
• Called by /coco:phase (Step A) or /coco:planning-session tactical
• When a design.md is needed in specs/{feature}/ before task generation

For single-issue fixes, use the hotfix skill instead.

Setup

1. Read .coco/config.yaml for project.specs_dir (default: specs).
2. Determine the feature from conversation context:
   • If a feature name or description was provided in the current conversation, use it
   • If on a feature/* git branch, extract the feature name from the branch
   • If a spec directory was recently discussed, use that
   • If none of the above, ask the user for a feature description
3. Load .coco/memory/constitution.md if it exists.
4. Load the design template from .coco/templates/design-template.md if it exists, otherwise use ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/templates/design-template.md.
5. Load {specs_dir}/{feature-name}/discovery.md if it exists. When present, this discovery brief provides pre-validated user intent, scope decisions, and constraints gathered via the interview skill.

Execution

1. Generate Feature Identity

• Analyze the description and generate a 2-4 word short name (e.g., "user-auth", "analytics-dashboard")
• Use action-noun format when possible; preserve technical terms
• Determine the feature directory: {specs_dir}/{feature-name}/
• If a directory with this name already exists, append a numeric suffix

2. Create Feature Branch & Directory

Read pr.branch.feature_prefix from .coco/config.yaml (default: feature).

git checkout -b {feature_prefix}/{feature-name}

mkdir -p {specs_dir}/{feature-name}

The branch is feature/{feature-name} (e.g., feature/user-auth). The spec directory is {specs_dir}/{feature-name}/ (without the prefix).