ephx.devWhat changed in v2
Last week I shipped Tweak Idea — a Claude Code skillset that evaluates startup ideas across 14 weighted dimensions and gives you a scored report with concrete next steps for developing the idea. The v1 article walks through the original pipeline in full: the research stage, the 14 independent scoring agents, the hypothesis system.
The original pipeline — still the foundation in v2:
Tweak Idea pipeline
Some of the changes in Tweak Idea 2.0.0:
- deterministic Python scripts to do most of the work that used to run inside the LLM
- new commands for browsing, comparing, and improving ideas
- new amazing report layout
- profiles for your potential co-founders
The commands
In v2 the one /tweak:evaluate command becomes a family. Each new one is a step in the real loop of working on an idea: run it, look at it later, compare versions, get suggestions, find new things to try.
/tweak:evaluate
Start here. Pass an idea, get a full 14-dimension report back.
/tweak:list
Shows every idea that was evaluated so far.
/tweak:show
Opens a specific report in your browser. No re-running, just re-reading.
/tweak:compare
Diffs two runs side by side. It shows exactly what moved after you've iterated on an idea.
/tweak:improve
Reads your latest report and hands back concrete tweaks for the weakest dimensions.
/tweak:browse-hn
Scans Hacker News and surfaces posts describing real technology shifts. Feed the good ones into /tweak:suggest-from-hn.
/tweak:suggest-from-hn
Reads an HN post and generates startup ideas built on the shift it describes.
/tweak:evaluate "an app that helps restaurants reduce food waste"JSON in, JSON out
In v1, the LLM did everything. It wrote the whole report in prose, hundreds of lines, on every run. It generated the HTML output word by word. Every stage picked its own format.
In v2, the LLM reads JSON files and writes JSON files. The shape is fixed up front by a schema. Once a JSON file is written, nothing can change it. This workflow is great for Python: we can use scripts wherever the LLM is not necessary, for example to build different report formats.
Three things change:
- Reliability. Claude Code struggles with agent invocations that have to write a 700-line file. A 30-minute run no longer crashes halfway through a free-form report.
- Speed. A full run takes about 10 minutes now, down from 30. What the LLM does in 20 seconds, Python does in 20 milliseconds.
- Bounded failures. When one JSON file comes back broken, you point the LLM at that one file and ask it to fix it. Nothing else re-runs.
That last point is the one that matters most for serious Claude Code skills. The model is fast and creative, but it is not a replacement for code. Treat each LLM call in your skill as a function. Let code drive the pipeline. When the model fails, the failure stays in one place, and so does the fix. That is the pattern that made v2 work.
Cleaner reports
v2 makes the HTML report beautiful. It is something you would want to share. Take a look at the examples below.
Profiling co-founders
You can keep a profile for anyone you might team up with: a current co-founder, a candidate you are talking to, a friend you are considering. Then you can pull any of them into an evaluation.
Each profile is its own FOUNDER.md, written in your words: what they have done, what they are good at, what they would bring. When you run /tweak:evaluate, you can pick which profiles to include, and the idea gets scored against all of them together instead of against you alone.
It is a small change, but it shifts the question from "is this idea right for me?" to "is this idea right for the team I could build to ship it?"
Try it
Tweak Idea is open source. Clone the repo, drop the skill into Claude Code, and run /tweak:evaluate on an idea you have been chewing on. Or start with the web version below, no Claude Code needed.