/tlc-discover

name: tlc-discover
description: 'Interviews an unshaped idea into a verdict and a design document with literal decisions for tlc-plan. Use when the user says "research this", "help me understand this problem", "should we build this", "discovery", "explore this problem", or "tlc-discover". Do NOT use when the shape is already decided (tlc-plan), or to implement.'
license: CC-BY-4.0
metadata:
  author: Tech Leads Club - github.com/tech-leads-club
  version: 0.8.0

TLC Discover

Find out where this project actually is. Understand the problem. Decide whether to solve it. Then, and only then, decide how.

SITUATION ────→ PROBLEM ───────→ VERDICT ───────→ DECIDE
(where this     (no solution     (a stop, or a    (two shapes, costed
 project is)     proposed yet)    record)          against this repo)

**These are not a script, they are the prerequisite order.** What you run is an interview: ask whatever is answerable given what is settled, and stop when nothing answerable is left. The order falls out on its own, because *how* has *whether* as a prerequisite and *whether* has *where we are*. Marching them as four acts is how a discovery asks a project that never shipped what its problem costs today.

The failure that matters here is not inventing a fact, it is **converging early**: proposing a solution on turn two, hearing "sure", and manufacturing a decision that has all the authority of one and none of the examination. Everything below exists to make that harder.

The artifact is a design document humans read, not only the next skill. If Shape cannot tell a reader what will exist in the repository, or Roadmap which blocks are clear, it failed even with Decisions complete. This skill feeds tlc-plan.

Critical rules

1. **No technology is *proposed* before the verdict.** Not a library, not a provider, not a pattern. If the problem section argues for one, the framing is already a solution. This bans proposing, never knowing: what the project already runs, already committed to and already has half-written is a constraint, and meeting it late is how a discovery reopens what the team closed last month. 2. **The verdict is a stop wherever the decision is open.** Present it and wait. Where Situation established that somebody already committed, it is a line on the record instead of a gate - manufacturing a gate whose answer you know is the approval theatre that teaches everyone to click through the one that mattered. 3. **Never present an option you would not ship.** Two shapes are considered every time; the second earns a section only when it is live. When it is not, it earns one sentence naming what would have to be true for it to win - which is the disqualifying property the next skill needs anyway. 4. **Name the number that would change the decision before you go and get it.** Data with no question attached is noise that costs context. And a **missing number is not a finding about the problem** - it is usually a finding about the instrumentation. Ask; never read size out of silence. 5. **A decision without a concrete value is not decided.** A shape, a bound, a status, a field. Everything downstream refuses vague input; catching it here is where it is cheap. 6. **High impact plus low clarity does not get decided here.** It becomes an RFC or a spike. Forcing it produces the most expensive artifact there is: a decision that reads settled and is not. 7. **Solve for this context, not for the reference architecture.** The recommendation is the smallest shape that answers the problem as measured, and anything heavier has to be bought with a condition that is true now or credibly close. Options that exist only to widen the reader's view are welcome and are marked as exactly that - a line each, never dressed as candidates.

The interview

Ask what is answerable now. Every question whose prerequisites are settled is fair; one whose prerequisite is still open is not, because the answer to it is a guess you will then treat as a finding. **You are done when nothing answerable is left**, not when the sections below have all been visited, and a question that matters in a section you have not reached still has to be asked.

**Nothing here is owed a paragraph merely because it exists.** A step with no input costs a line, and a section with no content does not appear at all - certainly not as a heading with "N/A" under it, the same ceremony wearing an apology. This governs the questions and the document equally, and it is what lets one skill serve a two-hour change and a quarter of work.

**Every question carries your recommended answer and the reason, in a line.** Agreeing then costs a word and disagreeing costs a sentence, where a blank question hands the user the work they came here to have done. A question you have no recommendation for is usually one to look up instead.

**Facts you look up; decisions you ask.** Anything the repository, the tracker or the docs can settle, go and settle - spending someone's attention on a fact you could have read is how a session earns the reputation of being a form. Product opinion, priority and appetite for risk are theirs alone.

Keep the delivery small even though the frontier is wide: one question when the answers depend on each other, two when they do not. The frontier decides **what is askable and when you are finished**, never how many arrive at once. Ten at a time is a form dump, and people answer form dumps by agreeing.

**Some questions cannot be answered by talking at all.** How it should feel, one page or three - these need something to react to, and grinding on them doubles a session's length and converges on nothing. Catch it in the moment and route it out: to a spike where only building answers it, to a designer where only seeing it does. That routing is a result, not a failed extraction.

Situation

Three facts decide which questions below are worth asking at all, and getting them wrong is what makes a discovery feel like it is intervi