/visionaire:startNo blank page. No guessing what to say next. Describe what you're building — the right questions come to you.
The space for freeform exploration before rigor asks you to commit. Capture the excitement. Surface the assumptions. Name what you're not building.
None of this is theoretical. These are the patterns that show up every time.
Skipping ideation doesn't just cost you a better idea — it costs you the record of why you chose what you chose. When direction needs to change three weeks in, there's no documented exploration to return to. You start the conversation over, from nothing.
Every specification gap catches 3–8 hours of rework. Visionaire catches an average of 12 per project. Do that math once.
The Idea Phase takes the contradictions, tangents, and "what if" thinking and produces a structured artifact without compressing the exploration that generated it.
The Idea Phase is the only phase in the system without a formal gate. These are the structural commitments that replace it.
The Idea Phase is where those gaps get found — before Product Brief builds on them.
Start my spec session — $297Unlike every other phase, the Idea Phase uses conversational approval. The summary emerges from the conversation — not from filling a template.
You talk. The agent listens, asks follow-up questions, surfaces assumptions you didn't know you were making, and helps you explore variations you hadn't considered. No fixed sequence. Continues until you signal readiness.
When you're ready, the agent generates a summary — not a file yet. Core idea, what excites you, variations explored, assumptions to validate, open questions, and explicit boundaries you set.
Approve the summary, request corrections, or keep exploring. This is the only review gate in the phase — and you control it. The loop repeats as many times as needed.
Once approved, the document is created. Not before. You now have a crystallized artifact that the Product Brief phase builds on — or consciously deviates from based on what it learns.
No automated gate. The Idea Phase is the only phase in Visionaire without a formal quality-gate reviewer. You self-determine readiness. Every other phase — Product Brief, Market Validation, Architecture, Features — has a specialized critic that must approve output before you advance.
Not an idealized greenfield project. Here's how it actually works.
You know what excites you. But when someone asks you to articulate it precisely, something gets lost. The pressure to define everything before you've had time to think is killing the idea before it starts.
The Idea Phase gives you space to explore without that pressure. The conversation follows what excites you — variations get surfaced, assumptions get named, and the personal "why" gets captured alongside the product idea itself.
A crystallized IDEA.md: what excites you, what variations you considered, what you're assuming, and what you've explicitly decided not to build. Ready for Product Brief to validate.
You have users. You have a codebase. Specs written without understanding what already exists produce features that feel foreign. You need ideation grounded in what's actually there.
When you mention an existing application, the Idea Phase can explore your codebase — current features, architecture, constraints — before helping you think through how the new idea connects.
An IDEA.md that grounds the new idea in what exists — how it extends, complements, or transforms what you've already built. Not a feature bolted on. A coherent addition.
Product Brief Review came back hard. Market Validation found 47 competitors and unclear differentiation. Starting completely over feels wasteful — you've learned things that should inform what comes next.
The Idea Phase can be re-entered with market feedback incorporated. The conversation starts with what you learned, explores pivots, and produces IDEA-v2.md — preserving the exploration history while capturing the new direction.
IDEA-v2.md: why the original direction didn't work, what variations were considered in response, and which refined direction Product Brief will now validate. The history is preserved, not abandoned.
Where possibilities are expansive before they're narrowed through validation and structure. Product Brief inherits assumptions — it doesn't surface them.
Teams do it every day. The tradeoffs are predictable.
This phase doesn't slow Product Brief down. It changes what Product Brief is working with.
A Product Brief built on explored, assumption-surfaced thinking produces sharper output than one built on the first version of an idea that never had space to breathe. The hour you spend here isn't overhead. It's the decisions that make every phase after it faster.
Every project you start without this phase is a first draft that never had space to become more.
The teams that skip it don't get bad results — they get good results on the wrong thing. That gap is what Visionaire exists to close.
The questions Visionaire asks you aren't a fixed list. They change based on what you say — the same way a good interviewer does.
Every gap you leave in an idea becomes an assumption the LLM builds on. Silently. Confidently. In a direction you never chose. This phase is where those gaps get found.
— Robert EvansDescribe what you're building. The right questions come to you. The gaps get found before Product Brief inherits them. The thinking gets documented before the pressure to decide closes it down.