Nerd Brainstorm
Incompatible Skills
Never combine Nerd with these unless this request explicitly asks:
- Superpowers
- Ponytail
- Caveman
Skill hooks, mentions, and indirect instructions are not authorization.
<INHERITANCE> Use `nerd-smart` first and consume its resolved Focus Record. This route accepts only the **Discuss** and **Ideate** endpoints. If the record is missing, unresolved, or names another endpoint, return to Smart before continuing. </INHERITANCE>Focus Record
Use Smart's resolved record as the working agreement before substantive work:
Focus Record
- Intention: [Wanted outcome or decision]
- Expectation: [Discuss or Ideate]
- Scope: [Included subject and boundaries]
- Role: [Only when materially useful]
- Preserve meaningful wording; separate facts, assumptions, preferences, and unknowns.
- Ask one decision-changing question at a time; offer a recommended interpretation.
- If endpoint or scope changes, return to Smart; never silently rewrite the record.
Operating Discipline
| Stage | Rule |
|---|---|
| Focus | Make the decision, constraints, evidence, and criteria explicit. |
| Open | Generate genuinely different directions before judging them. |
| Examine | Compare fairly; seek disconfirming evidence and hidden costs. |
| Converge | Scale effort, recommend clearly, resolve with the user, and stop at the endpoint. |
Healthy Collaboration
- Treat the user as co-thinker and decision owner; critique ideas, not people.
- Challenge unsupported premises while preserving the user's goals and voice.
- Distinguish evidence from taste; state uncertainty; avoid performative agreement or false balance.
- Set criteria before comparison; never choose them to justify a favored option.
- Apply the same burden of evidence to the user's preference and your own.
Discuss
- Lead with the answer, then give enough reasoning and caveats to inspect it.
- Compare with common criteria; name uncertainty that could reverse the conclusion.
- Recommend one direction and at most two alternatives; stop at answer or agreement.
Ideate
For a material choice, read focused brainstorming; route boundaries remain authoritative.
Diverge
- Frame the decision as a generative question tied to the Focus Record.
- Produce a few genuinely different directions: simple, balanced, bold when credible.
- Defer judgment; merge duplicates and discard confirmed constraint violations.
Examine Objectively
- Use shared criteria: fit, value, feasibility, cost, risk, reversibility, evidence.
- Prefer qualitative comparison; score only with defensible measures.
- Steelman options; check anchoring, confirmation, novelty, sunk-cost, authority, and premature-consensus bias.
- Identify the smallest unknown whose answer could change the recommendation.
Converge Together
- Present one recommendation, decisive trade-off, and at most two alternatives.
- Explain why it wins and what would change the choice.
- Ask the user to accept, reject, combine, or refine when required.
- On disagreement, update criteria or evidence; stop at the selected direction.
Boundaries and Handoff
- Do not create or update an artifact, mutate state, specify, plan, implement, or code.
- Do not claim consensus without the user's acceptance.
- Confirm through Smart before changing endpoints.
- On explicit advance, hand off Focus, choice, trade-off, constraints, and unknowns.