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Cadence

/c-design

Source of truth: skills/c-design/SKILL.md. For the why behind this stage, read the Design deep dive.

Purpose

Section titled “Purpose”

Takes the 00-overview.md stub from /c-brainstorm and fills out the whole design folder (the child docs, the plain-English narrative, and the out-of-scope list), written for a human to read and approve.

When to use it

Section titled “When to use it”

Use /c-design once you have an approved-shape stub and want the full, reviewable design before any plan or code. It is the second stage, sitting between brainstorm and plan. Don’t use it to write a plan or touch code: those come later.

Invocation forms

Section titled “Invocation forms”
  • /c-design: materializes the design folder from the existing 00-overview.md stub in the current design slug.

After confirming the doc index, it asks one question: generate the child docs all-at-once (the default, parallel) or one-by-one (write, pause for your review, repeat).

Inputs & preconditions

Section titled “Inputs & preconditions”

A 00-overview.md with status: draft and a populated doc index. It refuses to run if the overview is missing, its status is not draft, the doc index is empty, or the stub still carries an “Open questions” block (a sign the stub was written too early).

What it produces

Section titled “What it produces”

A full design folder: 00-overview.md, 00a-plain-english.md, the numbered child docs (01-…, 02-…), optional 97-infrastructure-inventory.md and 98-architecture-diagrams.md when the doc index calls for them, and a 99-out-of-scope.md. After a self-review pass it flips the overview’s status to in-review.

Gates & guarantees

Section titled “Gates & guarantees”
  • A self-review pass (placeholder scan, wikilink integrity, decisions consistency, out-of-scope integrity, open-questions audit) runs before the status flips to in-review.
  • Status only advances to approved when you say so, never automatically.
  • It never writes or modifies code, never writes plans, and never writes a child doc that isn’t in the doc index (it loops back to update the overview first).
Section titled “Related commands”
  • Previous: /c-brainstorm produced the stub this command expands.
  • Next: /c-plan turns the approved design into an exact plan.
  • Deep dive: The Design stage for the artifact, the narrative, and the self-review gate.