Why I built a CLI tool to kill my own ideas

tracekc — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:57:28 +0000

We’ve all been there. You get a "brilliant" idea at 11 PM, and by midnight, you’re already git init-ing. You spend the next three weekends wrestling with state management, CSS, and deployment pipelines, only to realize a month later that:

The problem wasn't actually that painful for anyone else.

A giant incumbent already solves this perfectly.

The distribution hurdle is actually a brick wall.

As a product developer, I’ve realized that while AI has made the cost of building converge toward zero, the cost of building the wrong thing remains as high as ever.

To solve my own "idea-to-code" impulsivity, I built Shakedown.

The Concept
Socratic Grilling as a Reasoning Primitive
Shakedown isn’t a project management tool or a simple checklist. It’s a CLI skill designed to act as a "pressure test" for your concepts before you write a single line of code.

Instead of just listing features, it forces you into a Socratic dialogue. It uses LLM-backed reasoning to find the holes in your logic that your "creator’s bias" usually ignores.

How it works
The tool follows a specific "grilling" protocol to move an idea from a vague concept to a definitive signal:

Socratic Grilling
The system doesn't just agree with you. It asks uncomfortable questions. If you say you’re building "another Task App," it will ask why existing habits aren't enough and where exactly the friction lies in the status quo.
Landscape Research
It attempts to map out the existing territory. It identifies incumbents and potential "hidden" competitors that you might have missed in your initial excitement.
Differentiation and Adoption
This is the "so what?" phase. It challenges you on why a user would actually switch. Is the value proposition 10x better, or just 10% different?
The Output: Pursue / Pivot / Kill
At the end of the session, you get a cold, hard assessment:

Pursue: The logic holds up; the moat is clear.

Pivot: The problem is real, but your current solution is flawed.

Kill: Save your weekends. This isn't the one.

Why use a CLI for this?
Most validation frameworks live in spreadsheets or Notion docs, which feels like "work." By moving this into the CLI, it stays within the developer's natural environment. It’s a "pre-flight check" that lives right next to your compiler.

Feedback
I’ve open-sourced the logic and the skill definitions. If you’re the kind of person who starts coding too fast, I’d love for you to give it a spin and see if it can "kill" your next bad idea before it kills your free time.

Check out the repo here: https://github.com/tracekc/super-pm/blob/main/shakedown/skill.md

How do you usually "shakedown" your ideas before building? Let’s discuss in the comments.

DEV Community: tracekc

Why I built a CLI tool to kill my own ideas