The Brainstorm stage

Brainstorm is where a fuzzy idea in your head becomes a short written stub you can build on. It does that through one thing done well: disciplined question-and-answer.

One question at a time

The defining feature of /c-brainstorm is its restraint. It asks one question per turn (never a wall of questions), and every question follows the same shape: a plain-English lead explaining what’s being decided and why it matters right now, a short list of options, and exactly one option marked Recommended and listed first.

That structure matters for the non-coder audience: you are never handed a blank page. You react to a recommendation. You nod, or you redirect. The Q&A converges your thinking without ever asking you to write a spec from scratch.

Why the recommended option is mandatory

“It’s your call” is treated as a non-answer. Cadence always picks the option it would choose and says why, so you have a safe default even when you’re unsure. You can always override it.

Two modes: thought-partner and design-brainstorm

/c-brainstorm runs in one of two modes, and it detects which from how you phrase your idea:

• Thought-partner mode, exploratory. “Help me think about…”, “is X a good idea?”. It helps you reason and writes nothing unless you ask. The conversation itself is the value.
• Design-brainstorm mode, convergent. “I want to build…”, “design…”, “let’s add…”. It steers toward a concrete approach and ends by writing one artifact: a 00-overview.md stub.

If your phrasing is ambiguous, it asks once which mode you mean. You can also switch mid-session: “let’s capture this as a design” promotes a chat into a real stub.

The artifact: a 00-overview.md stub

In design-brainstorm mode, the session ends by writing a single short document: 00-overview.md under a dated folder. It contains a plain-English “what we’re building”, a one-line “why”, the chosen approach, a proposed index of child docs, and a decisions log recording every choice you made with its rationale.

Never half-finished

The stub never contains an “open questions” section. If a question is still open, Cadence keeps asking. It won’t write a stub with unresolved holes in it. A written stub is, by definition, a settled starting point.

Why it never auto-chains into design

This is the philosophical heart of the stage. When the stub is written, brainstorm stops and tells you to run /c-design yourself. It never silently rolls forward into writing the full design.

That stop is the first gate of the pipeline. Cadence is built so that nothing advances without an explicit human go-ahead, and the discipline starts here, at the very first artifact. The pause is the point.

QuizIn thought-partner mode, what does /c-brainstorm write by default?

1. Nothing: it writes an artifact only if you ask
2. A 00-overview.md stub every time
3. A full design folder
4. A plan with code steps

Show answer

A. Nothing: it writes an artifact only if you ask

Thought-partner mode is exploratory and artifact-free by default. Design-brainstorm mode is the one that ends with a 00-overview.md stub.

Exact usage: see the /c-brainstorm reference for invocation forms, modes, and the config-scaffold flow.

Next stage: The Design stage.