---
name: alternatives-explore
description: Generate and evaluate genuinely different approaches to a product, workflow, or system problem. Use when the user explicitly wants a bold, contrarian, experimental, or non-incremental alternative and a testable recommendation.
---

# Alternative Ideation

Recommend one useful abstraction shift and a bounded experiment without turning ideation into architecture or implementation.

## Workflow

1. State the core problem, current assumptions, constraints, and outcome that must remain valuable.
2. Generate several materially different bets by changing ownership, workflow, abstraction, distribution, architecture, or a supposedly necessary component.
3. Evaluate each bet for user value, distinctness, feasibility, reversibility, and testability.
4. Select the strongest bet and explain which default assumption it rejects, why that matters, and where it could fail.
5. Define the smallest experiment with bounded cost and a falsifiable success signal.

Do not produce cosmetic variants, settle final architecture, research unresolved technical facts, write an implementation plan, or implement the experiment. Use `architecture-refine` for architectural convergence, `technical-spike` for blocking technical evidence, and `plan-create` for implementation planning.

Finish after recommending one experiment and its success signal. A recommendation does not authorize implementation.