Researches and synthesizes external best practices, documentation, and examples for any technology or framework. Use when you need industry standards, community conventions, or implementation guidance.
Explore requirements and approaches through collaborative dialogue before writing a right-sized requirements document and planning implementation. Use for feature ideas, problem framing, when the user says 'let's brainstorm', or when they want to think through options before deciding what to build. Also use when a user describes a vague or ambitious feature request, asks 'what should we build', 'help me think through X', presents a problem with multiple valid solutions, or seems unsure about scope or direction — even if they don't explicitly ask to brainstorm.
Refresh stale or drifting learnings and pattern docs in docs/solutions/ by reviewing, updating, consolidating, replacing, or deleting them against the current codebase. Use after refactors, migrations, dependency upgrades, or when a retrieved learning feels outdated or wrong. Also use when reviewing docs/solutions/ for accuracy, when a recently solved problem contradicts an existing learning, when pattern docs no longer reflect current code, or when multiple docs seem to cover the same topic and might benefit from consolidation.
Document a recently solved problem to compound your team's knowledge
Systematically find root causes and fix bugs. Use when debugging errors, investigating test failures, reproducing bugs from issue trackers (GitHub, Linear, Jira), or when stuck on a problem after failed fix attempts. Also use when the user says 'debug this', 'why is this failing', 'fix this bug', 'trace this error', or pastes stack traces, error messages, or issue references.
Capture a visual demo reel (GIF, terminal recording, screenshots) for PR descriptions. Use when shipping UI changes, CLI features, or any work with observable behavior that benefits from visual proof. Also use when asked to add a demo, record a GIF, screenshot a feature, show what changed visually, create a demo reel, capture evidence, add proof to a PR, or create a before/after comparison.
Generate and critically evaluate grounded improvement ideas for the current project. Use when asking what to improve, requesting idea generation, exploring surprising improvements, or wanting the AI to proactively suggest strong project directions before brainstorming one in depth. Triggers on phrases like 'what should I improve', 'give me ideas', 'ideate on this project', 'surprise me with improvements', 'what would you change', or any request for AI-generated project improvement suggestions rather than refining the user's own idea.
Create structured plans for any multi-step task -- software features, research workflows, events, study plans, or any goal that benefits from structured breakdown. Also deepen existing plans with interactive review of sub-agent findings. Use for plan creation when the user says 'plan this', 'create a plan', 'write a tech plan', 'plan the implementation', 'how should we build', 'what's the approach for', 'break this down', 'plan a trip', 'create a study plan', or when a brainstorm/requirements document is ready for planning. Use for plan deepening when the user says 'deepen the plan', 'deepen my plan', 'deepening pass', or uses 'deepen' in reference to a plan. For exploratory or ambiguous requests where the user is unsure what to do, prefer ce:brainstorm first.