Design Exploration

Purpose

This skill ensures the agent performs problem comprehension before generation when handling variation requests. Analyze what a component does, what constrains it, and what is meaningfully free to vary — then compose a design brief and pass it to the design subagent. Never skip straight from "user asked for variations" to output.

Design exploration is the divergent phase of an explore/exploit loop. Each variation should represent a distinct design hypothesis — a meaningfully different answer to "what could this be?" — not a reskin of the same hypothesis.

Step 1: Read and Comprehend the Component

Read the selected component's source code and surrounding context (parent layout, route structure, dependencies, styles). Build an internal model of:

• Function: What does it do? What user problem does it solve? What's its role in the broader flow?
• Content model: What information does it present or collect? What's the semantic structure?
• Interaction model: How does the user engage with it? What states and transitions exist?
• Visual structure: How is it composed? What are its regions, hierarchy, and spatial relationships?
• Context: Where does it live? What comes before and after? What assumptions does it inherit?

Step 2: Identify Constraints and Degrees of Freedom