plaid

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PLAID — Product Led AI Development

An agent skill that guides founders from idea to launched product through structured conversations and AI-powered document generation. PLAID combines the thinking of a product strategist, brand strategist, UX researcher, design director, technical architect, and go-to-market specialist into a single skill with six capabilities.

Capabilities

PLAID is a single skill with six capabilities, each handling a distinct phase of the product development pipeline:

How It Works

1. Idea

Start here if you don't yet have a concrete product concept. PLAID Idea walks you through a stepped conversation that mines a great idea from what you already know or already do.

1. Source selection — Business, personal expertise, or both
2. Context capture — 8 targeted questions (or 10 combined, trimmed) surfacing workflows, unmet demand, unfair advantages, and obsessions
3. Pattern synthesis — 3–5 ranked candidate directions drawn directly from your answers
4. Scorecard — Each candidate scored on unfair advantage, pain level, audience reachability, MVP feasibility, and differentiation
5. Pick one — Opinionated recommendation you can accept, swap, or blend
6. Sharpen — Target user, specific problem, smallest testable version, why you, and top risky assumptions
7. Output — docs/product-idea.md

docs/product-idea.md feeds directly into Validate (recommended next step) and Plan — most of the Plan intake's first three sections are already answered.

2. Validate

Pressure-test the chosen idea before investing in Plan, Build, or Launch. Validate adapts the Startup Pressure Test framework into PLAID's flow.

1. Read or gather — If docs/product-idea.md exists, Validate reads it and confirms the direction. If not, it asks for the idea, target customer, and what you want them to do or pay for.
2. Find the core assumption — One sentence: the single thing that must be true for the business to work.
3. Surface fatal flaws — Up to 3, ranked by severity, each with a fast behavioral test.
4. Test problem reality — Vitamin or painkiller verdict, in the user's own language.
5. Map real competition — Including current behavior (always a competitor) and the real enemy you have to displace.
6. Plan the first 10 customers — Manual outreach, no ads, no automation. Where they are, how to reach them, what success looks like.
7. Define a 2-week MVP test — The smallest thing that tests the core assumption with real users.
8. Score and verdict — A 6-axis scorecard (pain intensity, buyer clarity, urgency, differentiation, speed to validate, founder advantage) and a direct strong / weak / pivot verdict.
9. Direction check — Before touching docs/product-idea.md, Validate surfaces the directional calls the findings imply (tighter target user, reframed problem statement, different MVP shape, pivot vs. stay) and asks you to choose. Only the choices you confirm get applied.
10. Sharpen the idea — Validate applies the agreed edits to docs/product-idea.md (target user, problem statement, MVP shape, risky assumptions) and tells you what changed. The Candidates considered section is preserved.
11. Output — docs/validation-report.md (the full diagnosis, preserved for the record) and updated docs/product-idea.md.

The validation scorecard sits alongside the Idea capability's candidate scorecard. Idea ranks 3–5 candidate directions; Validate stress-tests the chosen one. Both are kept.

3. Plan

Start here. PLAID Plan guides you through a structured vision intake conversation, then generates three product documents.

Vision Intake — An interactive conversation that captures your product idea through 8 sections:

1. About You — Name, expertise, and background story
2. Your Purpose — Who you help, the problem you solve, the transformation you deliver, and why you're the right person to build it
3. Your Product — Name, one-liner, how it works, key capabilities, platform (web/mobile/desktop/cross-platform), differentiation, and magic moment
4. Your Audience — Primary user persona, secondary users, current alternatives, and frustrations with existing solutions
5. Business Intent — Revenue model, 90-day goals, 6-month vision, constraints, and go-to-market approach
6. The Feeling — Brand personality, visual mood, tone of voice, and anti-patterns (what the product should never feel like)
7. Tech Stack — Frontend, backend, database, auth, and payments choices with comparison data and recommendations
8. Tooling — Which coding agent will execute the build

For each question, PLAID generates 3 tailored suggestions based on your previous answers. You can pick one, modify it, or write your own. All answers are saved to vision.json in the project root.

Document Generation — Reads vision.json and produces three documents in docs/:

4. Design

Translates an image — or a set of image references — into a structured docs/design.md file following Google's open design.md format. Standalone — does not require any other PLAID document, but pairs naturally with product-vision.md and prd.md.

1. Image intake — Share screenshots, mockups, Figma URLs (read via the Figma MCP), or live website references. Multiple images are supported; identify the primary anchor.
2. Image analysis — PLAID describes what's actually in the imagery: colors with approximate hex values, typography character, spacing density, shape language, elevation philosophy, components visible, and overall mood.
3. Context questions — A short interactive pass: emotional tone, audience and context of use, color role assignments, type scale, density, shape language, elevation, component priorities, and anti-patterns. Each question gets 3 tailored suggestions.
4. Token derivation — Synthesizes a YAML block with colors, typography, rounded, spacing, and components per the design.md spec. Variants like hover and pressed are separate component entries.
5. Prose drafting — Writes the eight canonical sections in order: Overview, Colors, Typography, Layout, Elevation & Depth, Shapes, Components, Do's and Don'ts. Prose explains the why behind the tokens.
6. Output — docs/design.md — front matter for coding agents, prose for design rationale.

5. Launch

Generates your go-to-market playbook. Requires vision.json and docs/product-vision.md from the Plan capability.

6. Build

Executes the roadmap phase by phase. Requires docs/product-roadmap.md and docs/prd.md from the Plan capability.

1. Reads the roadmap and finds the first phase with incomplete tasks
2. Builds each task in order, referencing the PRD for implementation details
3. Marks tasks complete as it goes (- [x])
4. Reviews code after each phase for bugs and inconsistencies
5. Commits to git after each phase
6. Continues until all phases are complete

Each phase produces a working, demoable product.

Adding PLAID as a Skill

PLAID is an AI agent skill. The quickest way to install it:

npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/plaid

This uses the skills CLI to install PLAID into your project automatically.

Manual Installation

If you prefer to install manually:

1. Open your Claude Code settings (either project-level .claude/settings.json or user-level ~/.claude/settings.json)
2. Add the path to the skill under the skills array:

{
  "skills": [
    "/absolute/path/to/plaid/SKILL.md"
  ]
}

Using PLAID

Start a new conversation with your AI coding agent and trigger PLAID:

Idea: "plaid idea", "Help me find an idea", "What should I build", "Product idea from my business"

Validate: "plaid validate", "Validate my idea", "Pressure-test", "Is this idea good", "Find fatal flaws"

Plan: "PLAID", "Help me build something", "Plan a product", "Define my vision", "Generate a PRD", "Spec out my idea"

Design: "plaid design", "Design from image", "Create design.md", "Image to design system", "Extract design tokens"

Launch: "plaid launch", "Go-to-market plan", "Launch strategy", "GTM"

Build: "plaid build", "Start building", "Execute the roadmap"

PLAID automatically routes to the right capability based on your request. No dependencies need to be installed — the skill is entirely documentation-driven.

What to Expect After Setup

Optional first session — Idea Discovery. If you don't yet have a concrete product concept, start with plaid idea. PLAID walks you through a stepped conversation that mines an idea from your business or expertise, ranks candidates on a scorecard, and writes docs/product-idea.md. This becomes input to Validate and Plan.