Process Plan Brainstorming

Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs

Adapted from the superpowers plugin (MIT).

Overview

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

When NOT to use: trivial, mechanical, or fully-specified tasks where design and requirements are already settled.

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)
• Ask questions one at a time to refine the idea
• 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

Exploring approaches:

• Propose 2-3 different approaches with trade-offs
• Present options conversationally with your recommendation and reasoning
• Lead with your recommended option and explain why

Capability check. Generating and weighing 2-3 genuinely different designs is capability-sensitive - a weaker model produces shallow, near-duplicate options. If the session is on a lesser tier, delegate the approach-generation/synthesis to a pinned sonnet/opus subagent or offer switch-model-or-continue (the main agent cannot self-switch its model). See bitranox:process-agents-subagent-driven-development ("The session model is fixed").

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

After the Design

Documentation:

• Write the validated design to docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md
• Optional: the writing-clearly-and-concisely skill, which ships in the SEPARATE elements-of-style plugin (/plugin install elements-of-style@superpowers-marketplace), not in this one - skip this line if you do not have it installed
• Commit the design document to git

Implementation (if continuing):

• Ask: "Ready to set up for implementation?"
• REQUIRED SUB-SKILL: Use bitranox:git-worktrees to create an isolated workspace
• REQUIRED SUB-SKILL: Use bitranox:process-plan-writing-plans to create a detailed implementation plan

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
• 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