---
name: shape
description: Decide the technical path once the ask is clear. Use when the WHAT is confirmed but more than one way to build it remains — architecture, technology, design.
---

## Route

Decide only among ways that differ where it matters. Where no work order states the bar the ask must meet, use **deepen** skill first. Look up what settles a choice without the user — the bar, their taste from CLAUDE.md and project rules, what their own accounts and plans already offer, facts from the repo, docs, the web. Only choices that stay open after that route to a skill.

Route each open choice by what keeps it open, invoking the named skill with the Skill tool:

- A claim about something that exists — a library fits, the schema holds, the current design bears the load → use **judge** skill.
- The user can't choose from nothing — nothing exists to react to → use **draft** skill: the fewest versions that show a real fork, differing where it matters — who owns the data, where the seam sits, what fails how.
- The user holds taste they can't yet state → use **elicit** skill.
- Their stated preference reads two ways that would build different things → use **clarify** skill.
- They're missing something already settled about the technology → use **explain** skill.

When the work iterates — an agent loop, a refinement cycle — which loop is itself one of the choices: read `loop-selection.md`.

Each decision re-enters the routing: a resolved choice can open the next one or conflict with an earlier one; a conflict is one more choice, surfaced to the user. Route again until every open choice has the user's decision or confirmation and none conflict.

## The path

Ask any choice still open first, with AskUserQuestion. Then state each resolved choice with its reason and what lost.

The path is chosen and no target contract will judge it → use **inversion** skill on it; each negated line joins the path as a constraint.

The ask itself is still rough — starting would mean inventing what the user means → use **intent** skill.