whats-next

/whats-next is the plugin’s home base. It sets up a brand-new project, orients you whenever you return, escalates to a full reassessment when something meaningful shifted, and catches pivots before they silently invalidate your work.

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When to reach for it

• You have a new idea and nothing set up yet
• You’re returning to a project and need a reminder of where things stand
• You just finished a milestone and wonder what’s next
• You’re questioning the direction (“is this still right?”)
• Something fundamental about the idea changed

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First run: setting up your project

With no startup/ folder present, /whats-next starts the setup conversation. It first asks how far along you are, then routes accordingly:

• “It’s all in my head” — a guided idea-elaboration conversation, one question at a time. B2C ideas pin down Audience, Problem, Solution, and Geography (with a “can you name 3–5 specific people who have this problem?” sanity check); B2B ideas work through the ICP, the buyer-vs-user distinction, and business-pain framing (with a “name 2–3 real target accounts” check).
• “I have a landing page / pitch deck / one-pager” — share URLs or paste text; the advisor reads your materials, infers the core fields, and proposes them for your review instead of interrogating you.
• “I’ve already done discovery or built something” — same as above, plus intake of competitors you already know and any interviews you’ve already run.

You end with a scaffolded workspace, a confirmed core.md (including a “How It Reads” outsider-facing pitch), and a first plan of 2–3 concrete steps.

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Every other run: orientation

Once a plan exists, /whats-next defaults to a quick orientation. It reads your plan, scans what’s changed in your artifacts, checks off completed steps, and answers at two altitudes:

• Strategic — your plan’s Current Focus: the milestone that matters now.
• Tactical — the single sharpest concrete move, drawn from your hypotheses’ next actions: who to put something in front of, and what to show them.

Orientation never restructures the plan. If you’re stalled waiting on something slow (interviews scheduled but not happening), it may suggest a cheap parallel test — a fake door or small paid-traffic run — as an option, never a demand.

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Full reassessment

When a milestone completes, results contradict the plan, or you ask to rethink direction, your entire project state goes to an independent advisor pass — every file, including MVP results and surveys — which reasons from evidence alone (see How the advisor works). Its recommendations are walked through with you conversationally, then the plan is updated: steps checked off, a new Current Focus if warranted, new steps, and a dated log entry. This is also how the loop closes after your MVP is live: the reassessment measures results against your success criteria and lands on persevere, iterate the experiment, or pivot.

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Pivot detection

If foundational fields changed — different audience, reframed problem, new solution shape — the reassessment flags it, and /whats-next walks your artifacts one at a time with a keep / reframe / archive proposal for each hypothesis, competitor, and interview script. Everything is confirmed before changing; archiving is reversible; interview evidence is never archived. It’s framed as sharpening the toolkit, not cleanup — and it ends by naming the gaps the new direction creates.

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What it writes

Details of both formats: Your plan.

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Good to know

• Plans deliberately stay short — the next 1–2 milestones, not a roadmap to launch. Overwhelm is a failure mode.
• Quick orientation reads existing next actions from disk; hypothesis assessments refresh during full reassessments and after interview analysis, not on every orientation.
• The advisor only ever looks at your current working directory — never parent folders or anything outside the project.