Idea Crucible 🔥

Idea Crucible 🔥

A skill for breaking ideas apart before building them. Tests what deserves to survive.

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Use This When

• You have an idea that wants to become a product too quickly
• You need to break it apart before building
• Something feels compelling but fragile
• You want to find the fracture points before committing

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What This Does

Idea Crucible puts ideas under pressure to see what survives. It:

1. Demands the core claim in one sentence
2. Extracts 3–5 binary foundational assumptions
3. For each: identifies fracture points, evidence, and skeptic perspectives
4. Surfaces what's being avoided
5. Documents tensions without resolving them
6. Requires at least one proven-fragile assumption and three genuine unknowns
7. Only then compiles surviving assumptions into proto-requirements

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Operation Flow

Step 1: Core Claim

State your idea in one sentence. What's the essential claim?

Step 2: Extract Assumptions

What must be true for this to work? Surface 3-5 foundational assumptions.

Step 3: Apply Pressure

For each assumption:

• Fracture points: Where does it break?
• Evidence: What supports it?
• Skeptic view: What would Max say?

Step 4: Surface Avoidance

What questions are we not asking? What failure modes are we ignoring?

Step 5: Document Tensions

Hold contradictions without resolving them. Some tensions are the answer.

Step 6: Test for Unknowns

Require at least:

• One proven-fragile assumption
• Three genuine unknowns

Step 7: Extract What Survived

Only assumptions that held under pressure become proto-requirements.

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Output Format

### Core Claim
[One sentence statement]

### Foundational Assumptions
1. [Assumption]
   - Fracture points: [Where it breaks]
   - Evidence: [What supports it]
   - Skeptic says: [Challenge]

2. [Next assumption with same structure]

### Avoided Questions / Failure Modes
- [What we're not asking]
- [What we're pretending won't happen]

### Living Tensions
- [Contradiction we must hold]
- [Trade-off with no clean answer]

### Genuine Unknowns
1. [Something we truly don't know]
2. [Another unknown]
3. [Third unknown]

### What Survived Pressure
[Proto-requirements from assumptions that held]

### Next Pressure Point
[Where to test next]

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Flows Into

• Q&A Runner → to interrogate specific fractures deeper
• Convergence Move → only after genuine unknowns are documented
• Writing Workshop → to draft initial problem statement (not PRD)
• Exploratory Reasoning → to investigate alternative approaches

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Guards

• Never skip the pressure test: Every assumption must be challenged
• Require genuine unknowns: If there are none, you're not being honest
• One fragile assumption minimum: If everything holds perfectly, you're not pushing hard enough
• Don't resolve tensions prematurely: Some contradictions are structural features, not bugs

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Example Invocation

"I want to run this idea through the Crucible: [idea description]"

"Use Idea Crucible to test this product concept before I write a spec."

"Crucible mode - I think this feels too polished and I don't trust it yet."