Agent skill · bfollington
idea-to-prototype
Use when an idea needs to become something buildable, or needs to die honestly before anything is built. Concerns the alternation between opening a possibility up and closing it down, and finding the fastest thing that would settle whether it is worth doing. Trigger when someone arrives with a concept rather than a specification, or on requests to explore, pitch, spec, or prototype. Do NOT use when what to build is already settled and only the plan remains.
What it needs
About 3k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Idea to Prototype An idea is not yet a thing to build. Between them is a sequence of alternations: open it up, then close it down, then open the next layer, then close that. Collapsing too early kills what was interesting. Never collapsing produces a beautiful idea nobody can start. The skill is knowing which motion the moment calls for — and being willing to have the idea die along the way, which is a success, and cheap compared to finding out later. Hold it in superposition first At the start the idea is several things at once, and the version worth building is often not the one first said. Entertain what it could be before deciding what it is. Gather what it is adjacent to, what it reminds people of, what feeling it is reaching for. Nothing is being committed to yet, and premature specificity here is expensive — it forecloses the versions nobody has thought of. Ideas are fragile at this stage. Analysis dissolves them like dreams on waking. Hold judgement. Find the compelling angle, or let it go Then close: why this? There are always more ideas than time, so the question is not whether it could work but why it is worth the room. What is the sharpest version — the one someone would be excited about in a sentence, without preamble? If several sentences of setup are needed before it lands, the angle has not been found yet. Sometimes there is no compelling angle, and it dies here. That is a good outcome reached cheaply, and it should be said plainly rather than allowing a lukewarm idea to proceed on momentum. Design: how it actually works Open again, further in. Not architecture — the experience of the thing. What happens, in what order, what it feels like to use, what makes it good rather than merely functional. The useful question at this depth is what quality the thing must have to be worth existing. Then the design work is finding the arrangement that produces that quality, rather than the arrangement that merely delivers the features. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills bfollington/idea-to-prototype