brainstorming

A planning guide for coding tasks with several reasonable approaches or costly mistakes.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps clarify requirements one question at a time, inspect relevant project context, propose a design, and wait for approval before code is written.
Why use it?
It prevents coding from starting before unclear requirements and design trade-offs are settled.

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/chipfighter/coding-discipline/brainstorming
Any agent
npx skills add chipfighter/coding-discipline --skill brainstorming
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chipfighter/coding-discipline

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 83 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 631 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 $0.00083 $0.00631
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00316
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00126
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00063

Measured 2d ago against content hash a41c9c4e2904, 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.

plugins/coding-discipline/skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md · 27 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 27 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hard rule: write no code until the design is approved. Once this skill triggers, follow it through—the design may be only a few sentences, but it must be explained and approved first. Deciding midway that it is "actually simple" is not a reason to exit: "simple" often means unstated assumptions.

Excuses that surface when you want to skip design

What you tell yourself Reality
"This is too simple to need design." "Simple" means unstated assumptions, which are the most dangerous. A simple design may take only a few sentences, but it still needs to be explained and approved.
"It will be faster to think while building." Starting from a misaligned understanding makes rework slower. Align on the direction before acting.
"The user probably wants X." Do not decide for the user. Clarify one question at a time, and offer choices when possible.

Process

  1. Inspect the context first: relevant files, documentation, and recent commits. Do not design in a vacuum.
  2. Ask one question at a time to clarify the goal, constraints, and success criteria. Offer choices when possible; they are easier to answer than open-ended questions. Put only one question in each message.
  3. Split up work that is too large: if it is really several independent subsystems, stop and help divide it into subprojects and prioritize them before detailing a large task that should be broken apart.
  4. Present 2–3 approaches with tradeoffs: put your recommended option first and explain why, then list the alternatives and their costs.
  5. Present the design in sections and confirm each one: make each section as long or short as its complexity warrants. After each section, ask "Does this look right?" before continuing.
  6. Remove features that are not needed yet (YAGNI): if it is not needed now, do not design it.

After approval

Begin implementation only after the design is approved. If any part stops making sense along the way, return and clarify it. If the design establishes a durable project decision that cannot be inferred from the code (a technology choice / hard boundary / definition of done), ask whether to record it in the project guide (AGENTS.md for Codex, CLAUDE.md for Claude Code; see context-hygiene for how). If an approved outcome or acceptance criterion from this session must persist across sessions, also ask whether to create or update the current spec, then hand that work to spec-sync.

Read the full file on GitHub · 27 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 · 27 lines · 83 tokens per session scan A a41c9c4e2904

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository chipfighter/coding-discipline (6 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 631 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

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