Briefs & ideation

A brief is the shared context for a project: its topic, audience, purpose, target length, any constraints, the questions still open, and an optional thesis. Every later stage reads from it, so a clear brief makes the rest of the work sharper.

Finding the brief

Open a project and click “Brief — your setup answers” on the project overview, or pick Brief under the project in the left sidebar. The brief is where the answers from your project setup interview live, so this is how you get back to review or edit them. When you finished the interview, the Brief opens straight to the filled-in answers, ready to read and change.

Reading the interview behind your brief

The Brief page keeps every coach interview this project has had, below the brief itself — the one that set the project up when you created it, any time you revisited setup, and any brief you built in conversation. Each is shown as the questions you were asked and the answers you gave, in the order they happened; open a run to read it. Unfinished and abandoned runs are kept too, and labelled, so nothing you spent credits on disappears.

Leaving an interview

If you navigate away while a coach interview is running — the project setup, the brief, a series, or a voice — Oghmere asks before letting you go, and your answers are kept. Come back and the surface offers to pick up where you left off, so the questions you already paid for are not asked again. You can always choose to start over instead.

Starting a brief

If the project has no brief yet, the Brief opens on a short introduction and two ways in: build it in conversation with a coach, which spends credits, or fill in the form yourself, which is free. Nothing starts until you choose. If you began a brief interview earlier and left before finishing, the Brief offers to pick it up where you left off — your answers, and the credits they cost, are still there. You can also start fresh or switch to the form instead.

Writing the brief

On the Brief surface you can chat with a coach that asks interview questions and assembles a draft from your answers, or edit the brief yourself as a single document. The read view shows the brief formatted; switch it to Raw to see the underlying markdown. “Edit as a single document” opens a markdown editor with a formatting toolbar (bold, italic, headings, lists, links) and Ctrl/Cmd+B, +I, and +K shortcuts, so you can correct anything directly. Keep the ## section headings — each part feeds the coaching agents. Changes auto-save, so the brief stays yours to edit.

Ideation

Ideation is a coached conversation on a single document. The coach asks clarifying questions to help you develop that document’s thesis, then gathers what you said into a document-level brief. When it is ready, you can promote that into the project brief so the rest of the workflow builds on it.

Bringing in your setup answers

The first time you open Ideation on a document in a project whose setup interview you completed, the coach offers to bring in the answers that bear on this document — each one shown with the question you originally answered. Tick the ones to carry over and choose “Bring these in”, and they seed the Emerging Brief so the coach builds on them instead of re-asking. Choose “Not now” to start from a blank conversation; either way the offer does not return for that document.

Phases

A phase is one ideation conversation bound to a document. A document can have several — Phase 1, Phase 2, and so on — so you can explore different angles without losing an earlier thread. Use the tabs above the chat to switch between phases, and “New phase” to start a fresh one; double-click a tab or the pencil to rename it.

How a phase feeds the brief and the outline

• Emerging Brief → document brief — as you talk, the coach gathers brief details into the panel beside the chat. “Save to document brief” promotes that draft into the document’s brief; from there you can promote it into the project brief.
• Emerging Outline — a turn can also update the document’s working outline and record a version tagged with the phase it came from. If your draft moves ahead of what ideation last saw, a catch-up banner offers to bring the outline back in step.
• Cross-phase conflicts — when a sibling phase has changed the shared outline, the coach flags what that turn overturns so you notice the shift.

Closing and deleting a phase

Closing a phase hides it from the tabs but keeps it, along with the brief and outline history it contributed — you can restore it later. Deleting a phase moves it to a recoverable state for 30 days before it is removed for good; the outline versions it recorded stay in the document’s history.