brainstorming

A guided process for exploring a new feature or behavior before writing code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Investigating project context, asking clarification questions, comparing approaches, writing a design document, and preparing an approved design for implementation.
Why use it?
It helps uncover requirements, constraints, design choices, and unclear assumptions before implementation begins. The process includes review and approval of a written design.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brain-bootstrap/claude-code-brain-bootstrap/brainstorming
Any agent
npx skills add brain-bootstrap/claude-code-brain-bootstrap --skill brainstorming
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brain-bootstrap/claude-code-brain-bootstrap

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 27 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 969 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00027 $0.00969
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00485
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00194
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00097

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7a2bdfa94dfd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brainstorming scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md · 100 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 100 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs

Turn ideas into fully formed designs and specs through collaborative dialogue. Understand the idea first, explore approaches, present a design, get approval — then plan.

Anti-Pattern: "This Is Too Simple To Need A Design"

Every feature goes through this process. A todo list, a single-function utility, a config change — all of them. "Simple" projects are where unexamined assumptions cause the most wasted work. The design can be short (a few sentences for truly simple requests), but you MUST present it and get approval.

Checklist

Complete in order:

  1. Explore project context — check files, docs, recent commits
  2. Ask clarifying questions — one at a time: purpose, constraints, success criteria
  3. Propose 2-3 approaches — with trade-offs and your recommendation
  4. Present design — in sections scaled to complexity, get user approval after each section
  5. Write design doc — save to claude/tasks/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md and commit
  6. Spec self-review — check for placeholders, contradictions, ambiguity (fix inline)
  7. User reviews written spec — ask user to review before proceeding
  8. Transition to implementation — run /plan command to create implementation plan

The Process

Understanding the idea:

  • Check the current project state first (files, docs, recent commits)
  • Before asking detailed questions, assess scope: if the request describes multiple independent subsystems, flag this immediately and help decompose into sub-projects first
  • Ask questions one at a time to refine the idea
  • Prefer multiple choice questions when possible
  • Only one question per message — break complex topics into multiple questions
  • Focus on: purpose, constraints, success criteria

Read the full file on GitHub · 100 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 100 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A 7a2bdfa94dfd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository brain-bootstrap/claude-code-brain-bootstrap (11 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 969 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

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review-spec

Use after implementing tasks or mid-feature to verify code matches design docs and ensure they are in sync. Detects spec deviations, missing implementations, doc inconsistencies, and outdated docs in design and implementation documentation.

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chain-of-verification

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review-code

Code review of current git changes with an expert senior-engineer lens. Detects SOLID violations, security risks, and proposes actionable improvements. Use when performing code reviews.

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review-design

Review design, implementation, and task documents produced by design. Evaluates document quality, internal consistency, and technical soundness. Use after design completes and before starting implement.

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design

Use in pre-implementation (idea-to-design) stages to understand spec/requirements and create a correct implementation plan before writing actual code. Turns ideas into a fully-formed PRD/design/specification and implementation-plan. Creates design docs and task lists in docs/wip/.

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