Front-loads gap discovery before /grill-me by adding two skills:
research MOSTLY fans out Explore + WebSearch agents in parallel,
synthesizes findings into a brief, names open
unknowns explicitly (which become /prototype targets)
prototype MOSTLY builds a throwaway spike to test ONE falsifiable
assumption; code lives in .prototypes/ (gitignored),
never promoted; output is evidence — verdict, numbers,
observed behavior — that feeds /prd
Full chain now:
/research → /prototype → /grill-me → /prd → /prd-to-issues → /ship-it
Chain rationale: /research and /prototype surface knowledge gaps and falsify
risky assumptions while the cost of changing direction is still cheap; the
TOGETHER phases (grill-me, prd) lock down the contract; the AFK phase
(ship-it) only executes against contracts already on paper.
The chain is a default, not a mandate — README covers when to skip
upstream skills for small or stack-familiar work.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>