brainstorm

A structured brainstorming command for exploring several ways to solve a problem. It asks about the goal and constraints, compares at least three approaches, and summarizes their tradeoffs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore alternatives, compare pros and cons, and choose an approach before writing code.
Why use it?
It helps turn an unclear decision into explicit options with their benefits, drawbacks, and expected effort.

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/bugrabilge/bilge-development-kit/brainstorm
Any agent
npx skills add bugrabilge/bilge-development-kit --skill brainstorm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bugrabilge/bilge-development-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 53 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 449 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 $0.00053 $0.00449
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00225
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00090
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00045

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5a1be223a516, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brainstorm 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/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 109 lines

What it actually says

/brainstorm - Structured Idea Exploration

$ARGUMENTS


Purpose

This command activates BRAINSTORM mode for structured idea exploration. Use when you need to explore options before committing to an implementation.


Behavior

When /brainstorm is triggered:

  1. Understand the goal

    • What problem are we solving?
    • Who is the user?
    • What constraints exist?
  2. Generate options

    • Provide at least 3 different approaches
    • Each with pros and cons
    • Consider unconventional solutions
  3. Compare and recommend

    • Summarize tradeoffs
    • Give a recommendation with reasoning

Output Format

## Brainstorm: [Topic]

### Context
[Brief problem statement]

---

### Option A: [Name]
[Description]

Pros:
- [benefit 1]
- [benefit 2]

Cons:
- [drawback 1]

Effort: Low | Medium | High

---

### Option B: [Name]
[Description]

Pros:
- [benefit 1]

Cons:
- [drawback 1]
- [drawback 2]

Effort: Low | Medium | High

---

### Option C: [Name]
[Description]

Pros:
- [benefit 1]

Cons:
- [drawback 1]

Effort: Low | Medium | High

---

## Recommendation

**Option [X]** because [reasoning].

What direction would you like to explore?

Key Principles

  • No code - this is about ideas, not implementation
  • Visual when helpful - use diagrams for architecture
  • Honest tradeoffs - don't hide complexity
  • Defer to user - present options, let them decide
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 · 109 lines · 53 tokens per session scan A 5a1be223a516

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository bugrabilge/bilge-development-kit (10 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 449 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

brainstorming

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.

obra/superpowers · 37 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

agent-host-chat-contributions

Build and review cross-cutting agent-host chat behavior through lifecycle contributions. Use when adding turn lifecycle side effects, prompt or context injection, restored-history transformation, protocol-action observation, or when reviewing changes that add code to AgentSideEffects or AgentService.

microsoft/vscode · 56 tokens

auto-perf-optimize

Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.

microsoft/vscode · 62 tokens