brainstorming

Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs

Overview

Help turn ideas into fully formed designs and specs through natural collaborative dialogue.

Start by understanding the current project context, then ask questions one at a time to refine the idea. Once you understand what you're building, present the design in small sections (200-300 words), checking after each section whether it looks right so far.

The Process

Understanding the Idea:

• Check out the current project state first (files, docs, recent commits).
• Recall the goal, purpose, design principles, and other relevant information from memories.
• Ask questions one at a time to refine the idea with AskUserQuestion tool.
• Prefer multiple choice questions when possible, but open-ended is fine too.
• Only one question per message - if a topic needs more exploration, break it into multiple questions.
• Focus on understanding: purpose, constraints, success criteria.
• Explain your options by taking the user's strength and weakness into consideration.

Exploring Approaches:

• Propose 2-3 different approaches with trade-offs
• You MUST use WebSearch to gather ground truth for open source projects, platform specific technologies and research results.
• Present options conversationally with your recommendation and reasoning
• Lead with your recommended option and explain why

Validating Information:

• Check Sources: Verify the credibility of sources found via web search.
• Check Recency: Explicitly check the date and time of information. Discard outdated info.
• Resolve Conflicts: When findings contradict, reason about the conflict based on source authority and recency.
• No Hallucinations: Do not jump to conclusions without validation. If uncertain, verify with a search or ask the user.

Presenting the Design:

• Once you believe you understand what you're building, present the design
• Break it into sections of 200-300 words
• Ask after each section whether it looks right so far
• Cover: architecture, components, data flow, error handling, testing
• Be ready to go back and clarify if something doesn't make sense

Update the Plan and Review the Plan:

1. You MUST call EnterPlanMode to enter plan mode.
2. Use the amplify:write-plan skill update the session plan file.
3. You MUST call ExitPlanMode for the human review.

Key Principles

• One question at a time - Don't overwhelm with multiple questions
• Multiple choice preferred - Easier to answer than open-ended when possible
• YAGNI ruthlessly - Remove unnecessary features from all designs
• Ground Truth First - Use web search/fetch to validate facts; do not rely on stale internal knowledge
• Verify Validity - Check source, date, and time of external info before using it
• Guardrails - Never present assumptions as facts; validate before concluding
• Explore alternatives - Always propose 2-3 approaches before settling
• Incremental validation - Present design in sections, validate each
• Be flexible - Go back and clarify when something doesn't make sense