| name | sow |
| description | Brainstorm goodness-based project ideas with the user — a structured ideation session that starts from service (who is hurting, who do you already serve) rather than opportunity, generates candidate seeds, rough-vets each through the four gates, and plants keepers in the garden. Use when the user wants project ideas, asks "what should I build next", or wants to brainstorm their future good/pure/valuable technical project. |
| argument-hint | optional: a domain, a pain you've seen, or nothing |
/sow — find seeds worth planting
Goal: leave this session with 1–3 candidate seeds the user actually feels called to,
each rough-vetted, planted in the garden as SEEDLING.
Resolve $ROOT and $GARDEN_DIR as in skills/seed/SKILL.md (root waterfall +
landmark, garden dir, entry format). Read $ROOT/doctrine/DOCTRINE.md and skim
$ROOT/doctrine/EXEMPLARS.md first.
Step 1 — Harvest (the raw material is the user's life, not the market)
Good seeds are found in what the user has witnessed and carried, so harvest before
generating. Use one AskUserQuestion round (multiSelect where natural) plus open
conversation, covering the five vectors:
- The Wound — pain they've experienced or watched someone experience firsthand.
- The Neighbor — people they already serve and know deeply (family, colleagues,
their community, their country's context).
- The Lantern — hard-won knowledge they hold that others stumble without.
- The Commons — a shared resource that should exist and doesn't, that everyone
would tend.
- The Dignity — a place where people are currently treated as metrics/cattle
(ads, dark patterns, extraction) and deserve a tool that treats them as persons.
Also mine what you already know of the user (their projects, skills, past work) —
personalize; do not harvest from a blank slate.
Step 2 — Generate candidates
Produce 6–10 candidate seeds across different vectors. Each candidate is exactly
three lines:
- who: the served human, specific enough to picture
- gift: what concretely gets better in their week
- mechanism: how, in one honest sentence (parties + flows, no adjectives)
Blocked vectors — never generate from these (except explicitly labeled as a
teaching counter-example): The Arbitrage (value from a gap someone else will close),
The Trend (built because it's hot, not because someone's served), The Trap
(capture-then-monetize), The Skim (interposing in a flow without adding value).
Step 3 — Rough-vet
Run all candidates through the four gates quickly — enum verdicts only, one line
of evidence each (vocabularies in DOCTRINE.md). Render as a table. Kill obvious
REFUSEs out loud, naming which gate failed and why — the kills teach the doctrine.
Step 4 — Choose
AskUserQuestion (multiSelect): which candidates to keep as seedlings — but weight the
user's pull over the scores: a seed the user feels called to tend beats a seed that
merely scores well. Say so.
Step 5 — Plant
Append each keeper to $GARDEN_DIR/garden.md in the standard entry format,
status SEEDLING, gates from the rough-vet. Close by offering next step: deep-vet
one now (skills/vet/SKILL.md) or stop here.
