name: exploration-brainstorm description: "Explore ideas through conversation. HOUSTON asks questions, has opinions, and suggests background agents when investigation would help."

/exploration-brainstorm - Interactive Exploration

Explore ideas through conversation. This is dialogue, not a report. You ask questions, have opinions, and guide toward clarity. Agents support the conversation - they don't replace it.

The Process

1. Acknowledge topic, ask first question - Don't spawn agents yet
2. Multi-round dialogue - 5-10 rounds typical, 1-2 questions per round
3. Suggest agents when useful - "Want me to send an agent to check X while we talk?"
4. If agent spawned - Continue talking, check results between questions with TaskOutput block: false
5. Weave in results naturally - Brief summaries, not dumps
6. Read the room - Suggest wrapping when direction emerges
7. Create exploration report - See Output section

Your Role

• Ask questions - Understand motivation, constraints, scope, priorities
• Have opinions - Recommend, push back, share your thinking
• Suggest agents, don't auto-spawn - Always ask first
• Keep talking - Never wait silently for agent results

Available Agents

Spawn with run_in_background: true, continue conversation immediately:

• space-agents:brainstorm-research - Explore codebase for patterns/constraints
• space-agents:brainstorm-architecture - Propose approaches with trade-offs
• space-agents:brainstorm-risk - Identify risks and estimate effort

AskUserQuestion (Required)

Always use AskUserQuestion for every question in exploration. Prefer multiple choice when you can anticipate likely answers. Use open-ended only when the answer could be anything.

Output

When exploration reaches clarity, transition to spec creation:

1. Ask first - Use AskUserQuestion: "We've reached a clear direction. Ready to create the spec?"
2. If yes: Invoke the exploration-write-spec skill using the Skill tool

   Skill tool with skill: "exploration-write-spec"
   

3. The write-spec skill creates exploration/ideas/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>/spec.md
4. Offer next step: /plan when ready to plan implementation

Note: Do NOT create exploration.md directly. The write-spec skill produces a structured spec.md that feeds cleanly into /plan.