DBOW explained: Demand → Brainstorm → Overview → Workflow

A stage-by-stage tour of the DBOW loop — what each step consumes, what it produces, and why the contract between stages is what makes Aidbow composable.

TL;DR — DBOW is four stages with hard contracts between them. Because the contracts are stable, you can replace any stage — human, LLM, or agent — without touching the others.

Why a loop, not a prompt

A single prompt asks a model to do everything at once: understand, diverge, judge, and plan. That collapses quatro different mental modes into one pass, and quality suffers. DBOW separates them, so each stage can be done well and checked.

The four stages

D — Demand

Input: a raw request. Output: a decomposed brief with explicit constraints and success criteria. Rule: if the brief is vague, everything downstream inherits the vagueness.

B — Brainstorm

Input: the brief. Output: many candidate ideas, each scored on the P-metrics. Quantity first — but every idea carries its own evidence.

O — Overview

Input: the idea set. Output: clusters, explicitly flagged conflicts, and a shortlist. Anti-hallucination rule: only summarize what is actually present, and attach a source id to every claim.

W — Workflow

Input: the shortlist. Output: ordered, shippable instructions a team or an agent can execute.

The contract is the product

What makes DBOW portable is not the stages themselves — it is that each stage declares a contract (its input and output shape). Swap the Overview stage from a human checklist to an automated summarizer and nothing else breaks.

See the interfaces in the open-source spec, or jump to Quick Start.