§ Generative
/decide
Direct each significant decision when extending or adjusting a chosen direction.
What it does
Most AI design tools take a prompt and produce output — deciding everything in between invisibly. /decide makes those intermediate decisions visible. It surfaces the meaningful tradeoffs as named options, lets you pick or delegate each one, and generates only after you’ve directed the significant calls.
/decide sits late in the generative loop. /design produces a first-pass surface; /remix surfaces alternative directions; once a direction is chosen, /decide is the command for ideating *on top of* it — adding a feature, refining a section, deciding how a new piece of UI should fit. It identifies the two to four decisions that will most shape the addition, presents them one at a time with named options, and stops to wait for your call. Each decision is a real creative-director choice — not a survey question, not a preference selection — with downstream implications you can think through before committing.
Decision flow
Decision 1 of 3
Brief: adding a personalization banner to the practices section of Stillpoint’s home page. Three decisions surface; each picks a direction with a one-line rationale.
Before · current practices section
TODAYS PRACTICES
A practice for every moment.
Morning Grounding
Begin the day with a few mindful minutes.
Mid-day Reset
A short pause to reset between meetings.
Evening Wind-down
Let the day settle before sleep.
Where does the personalization sit relative to the existing practices grid?
Banner above grid
✓ ChosenA full-width recommendation band above the three practice cards. Reads as a personal moment, then catalog.
Replaces a card
The personalized recommendation takes one of the three card slots. Tighter, but loses one of the curated practices.
Fourth card alongside
Adds a fourth card to the grid. Equal visual weight to the existing three; risks compounding the equal-cards pattern.
Inline within existing cards
No new UI; existing cards reorder or get a small tag based on the visitor. Quietest.
Why
Banner above grid keeps the curated three-practice rhythm intact while making the personal moment unmistakable. Replacing a card or adding a fourth shifts the section's information architecture; inline reordering is too quiet to do the work the feature is meant to do.
When to use it
- Adding a feature or new piece of UI to an existing screen, and the placement / prominence / pattern decisions are genuinely open.
- Adjusting a section of a chosen design direction, where multiple legitimate alternatives exist.
- The task has more than one reasonable answer and the right call depends on preferences you haven’t yet articulated.
- You want creative-director control over the meaningful decisions, not an autonomous output to react to.
- The deliverable is significant enough that rework from wrong assumptions would cost time.
How to use it
/decide accepts a brief describing what you’re adding, adjusting, or ideating on. It walks through the meaningful decisions one at a time. Each decision presents two or three named options plus a “Decide for me” delegation. After all decisions are made, /decide generates output that reflects what you directed — a new component, a modified section, or a small new piece of the surface.
- /decide adding a personalization banner to the practices section
- /decide a daily-reminder feature for the home page
- /decide how to extend the pricing page with a comparison view
Anti-patterns it addresses
- Reaching for /decide when starting from scratch — that’s /design’s territory. /decide assumes a direction already exists; it ideates on top of it rather than producing the foundation.
- Tools that decide everything invisibly, leaving the user to react to output rather than direct it.
- Survey-fatigue flows that ask 15 questions before producing anything. /decide stops at 2-4 decisions — the ones that genuinely shape the result.
- Template-based tools that present pre-made variations for selection. /decide is a guided process, not a curated menu.
- Decision flows that surface trivial choices (button color, spacing values) instead of the substantive ones (placement, prominence, register, pattern).