design-solution

/cl-dev:design-solution helps you settle on how you'll solve a piece of work before you break it into a plan. It produces a solution design (the approach, the key decisions, and the trade-offs behind them), then pushes on that design to make sure it holds up.

What it does

Given a claimed issue, this skill works with you to shape a solution design:

• The approach: the overall shape of the solution and how it fits your codebase.
• The key decisions: the choices that matter most, made explicit rather than left implicit.
• The trade-offs: what each decision costs and what it buys, so a reviewer can see why you went the way you did.

Once there's a design on the table, the skill grills it for soundness, surfacing weak spots, unstated assumptions, and gaps, so you pressure-test the thinking before you write code against it.

The result is a design artifact you and your team can review and build a plan from.

When to use it

Reach for design-solution after you've claimed an issue with /cl-dev:claim-issue but before you plan the work with /cl-dev:create-impl-plan. Use it when the issue is large or risky enough that jumping straight to a plan would bake in an approach you haven't examined.

Small, obvious issues don't need this step; you can go straight from claiming to planning. Use design-solution when there's a real decision to make and getting the approach wrong would be expensive to unwind. See where it sits in the workflow.

The skill is re-runnable. If a design already exists (yours or a teammate's), run it again to refine and harden it rather than starting over.

How to invoke it

In your coding agent, from a repository with a claimed issue in progress:

/cl-dev:design-solution

The skill picks up the issue you're working on, so the main precondition is having claimed one first. You can also add a short note about what you want the design to focus on: a specific concern, constraint, or option you want weighed.