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Two files form the spine of your project. core.md says what you’re building and for whom; plan.md says where your focus should be right now. Every skill reads them, and /whats-next keeps them honest.

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core.md — the project definition

The single source of truth about your idea. Created during your first /whats-next session, it holds:
  • Seed Description — your original pitch, preserved verbatim and never overwritten. Months later, it’s a useful record of where you started.
  • Core — the structured fields the elaboration conversation pins down: Audience (or ICP for B2B), Problem, Solution, Geography, and for B2B the buyer-vs-user distinction. Fields accumulate over time; a missing one just means “not defined yet.”
  • How It Reads — a two-to-three sentence outsider-facing version of the pitch, written after idea elaboration. If a stranger read only this, would they get it?
When research or interviews sharpen your understanding — say, a much more specific segment emerges — skills will propose updating the relevant Core field rather than silently drifting away from it.

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plan.md — focus, steps, and history

## Current Focus

One sentence: the single most important thing to focus on right now.

## Steps

- [x] Define the idea and target audience
- [ ] **Discover existing competitors**
- [ ] Conduct 5 customer discovery interviews

## Log

### 2026-04-12
What changed in this assessment and why.
  • Current Focus is the at-a-glance answer to “what should I be doing?” — milestone-level, not a task list.
  • Steps is a cumulative checklist; the bolded item is the current priority. Plans deliberately stay short — the next one or two milestones, not the whole journey.
  • Log is append-only history: every reassessment adds a dated entry explaining what changed and why, so you can trace how your direction evolved.

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How the plan changes

Only /whats-next manages the plan — other skills never edit it. It operates at two speeds:
  • Quick orientation (the default): reads the plan and your artifacts, checks off what you’ve completed, and tells you where you stand — the strategic focus plus the single sharpest concrete next move. It never restructures the plan.
  • Full reassessment (when something meaningful shifted — a milestone completed, results contradicting assumptions, you questioning the direction): your entire project state goes to an independent advisor pass that reasons from the files alone, and its recommendations — new focus, new steps, a log entry — are walked through with you before anything is written.

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Pivots

If foundational fields change — a different audience, a reframed problem, a new solution shape — that’s a pivot, and /whats-next notices. Instead of leaving stale artifacts around, it walks you through them one at a time: each hypothesis, competitor, and interview script gets a keep / reframe / archive proposal that you confirm. Two reassurances worth knowing:
  • Archiving is reversible. Archived files stay on disk with a note about why; flipping their status brings them back.
  • Interview evidence is permanent. Analyses and transcripts are never archived — real customer words remain valid evidence even when the idea around them changes.

whats-next skill

The skill that owns initialization, orientation, and re-planning.

The startup/ workspace

Where these files live and who writes what.