Guided Mode

A proactive, PM-style layer on top of the agent that flags gaps, reviews output, and points at the next step. · Recommended

Guided mode turns the agent from a tool you summon into a co-pilot that speaks up at the right moments. It's on by default for every project and fully skippable — flip one toggle to "I'll drive" and the traditional route is completely unaffected. Everything on this page is deterministic and free; the paid interview layer is covered separately in 9.2 — Interviews and decisions.

The toggle

At the top of the agent panel is a per-project switch:

• Guide me (default) — the agent proactively shows briefs, reviews, and coverage prompts.
• I'll drive — the agent only responds when you message it. No cards, no prompts.

The choice is saved per project, so you can guide one project and drive another. When the toggle is off, the panel renders nothing but the toggle row itself — there is no behaviour change to the section buttons or the chat.

The first time you open a guided project you'll see a one-time intro card explaining what guided mode does, with two buttons — Guide me and I'll drive. Pick either; the card never shows again.

What guided mode does

When guided is on, the agent contributes three kinds of ephemeral card. None of them is ever saved to your conversation history or sent to the model — they're computed locally from your project's current state.

1. Arrival brief — "Where you are"

When you land on a section (Features, Personas, Pages, Schema, and so on), the agent posts a short brief pointing at what's thin and the single best next step. Examples:

• On Features with none yet: "No features yet — they're the spine everything else hangs off."
• On Pages with orphans: "3 pages aren't tied to any user story — orphan pages tend to become scope creep."

A brief carries up to two one-click chips (the same pipeline chips as elsewhere), so you can act without typing. It's dismissible, and you see at most one per section per visit — if nothing on the current section is noteworthy, the agent stays silent rather than talk for the sake of it.

2. Post-generation review — "Generation review"

After a pipeline finishes, the agent posts a review of what just happened: what was created ("Created 8 user stories, 3 pages") and what's still thin, each with a one-click fix chip. Dismiss it once you've acted or read it.

3. Coverage check — "Check my coverage"

A Check my coverage chip is available on every project route, guided mode or not. It runs a deterministic gap report — features without stories, stories without criteria, pages without stories, personas without stories — and renders it as a card. Because it's pull-based and free, it works even when you're in "I'll drive" mode.

💡 Tip: Run Check my coverage right before 10.1 — Prepare for Dev. Closing gaps first makes the developer handoff far richer.

What it costs

Nothing. Arrival briefs, post-generation reviews, and the coverage check are all computed from data the panel already holds — zero LLM tokens, no extra generation charges. Only the optional pre-flight interview in 9.2 uses the model, and that's a Pro-plan feature you can skip on every run.

⚡ Power-user hints

• The chips inside a brief or review submit the exact same task payload as the section buttons — billing, live progress, and version control are identical.
• Guided cards are session-scoped: dismissals reset on a fresh session and never follow you across devices, so a brief you closed can re-arm next time if the gap is still open.
• A brief only reappears on the same section if the underlying signal has changed materially — you won't be nagged with an identical card twice in one session.

↔ The traditional way

On a real team this is the product manager's job: noticing a feature has no stories, reminding everyone to write acceptance criteria before the handoff, and reviewing each artefact as it's produced. Guided mode encodes that discipline into the editor, so a solo founder gets the same "someone's watching the plan" safety net without a second person in the room.

What's next

• 9.2 — Interviews and decisions — the Pro-plan pre-flight interview and the decision log it builds.
• 10.1 — Prepare for Dev — consolidate the spec into a build-ready blueprint.