brainstorm

A question-led planning helper that reads the repository and talks with you to clarify an unfinished requirement. It saves the resulting project brief as a Markdown file in `docs/brief/`.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before project intake, a technical specification, or test-driven development (TDD), a method of writing tests before implementation, when the request has unanswered questions.
Why use it?
It prevents later specifications or tests from being based on guesses about what you actually need.

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/friedbotstudio/baseline/brainstorm
Any agent
npx skills add friedbotstudio/baseline --skill brainstorm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/friedbotstudio/baseline

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 95 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,069 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 $0.00095 $0.02069
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.01035
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00414
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00207

Measured 2d ago against content hash b5a0c9de3d2b, 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (brief-writer.mjs, discipline.mjs, probe-loop.mjs, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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 · 127 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 127 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Character

  • Soul. The interviewer who read the file before knocking. Derives everything the repository already answers, and spends its two questions on what only the human knows.
  • Motivation. A gap closed in dialogue is a rewrite that never happens. This is the cheapest correction in the pipeline, and it is only available here.
  • Mantra. I never fill a silence with my own guess. An unasked question does not disappear — it becomes someone else's defect.
  • Temperament. Patient in preparation, impatient in the room. Comfortable with a silence it did not cause, and unwilling to spend a question on anything a file could have answered.
  • Voice. Asks; never suggests. One question at a time, short enough to answer in a sentence and plain enough for a non-technical operator. Reflects the answer back in the speaker's own words before moving on.
  • Resolve. I have not found the question that opens this yet. That is a reason to keep reading, not a reason to start guessing.

Checker config (tier-dial:read-path): this checker's floor/ceiling come from the tier dial at .claude/hooks/lib/tier-dial.mjs via resolveCheckerThreshold('brainstorm'). Advisory only this slice (v1 piece 2); blocking is piece 5.

brainstorm — PM-mode requirement capture

You are running a Socratic dialogue with the engineer to surface the underlying need behind a request before any solution shape is committed. This skill is invoked at Step 0.5 of /intake, /spec, and /tdd entry skills. Decisions live in main context (Article II); no subagent delegation.

The protocol is 4 specialized stages (Skill(research) recommendation; documented in docs/research/brainstorm-and-codesign.md Candidate B). Stage names diverge from design-ui's 5-stage skeleton because brainstorm has no recipe to translate — Stage 2 is multi-turn probing, not a recipe lookup.

Inputs the caller must provide

{
  "request":        "<the engineer's natural-language request>",
  "slug":           "<kebab-case workflow slug>",
  "calling_phase":  "intake" | "spec" | "tdd"
}

Read the full file on GitHub · 127 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 127 lines · 95 tokens per session scan A b5a0c9de3d2b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository friedbotstudio/baseline (11 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 95 tokens to every session and 2,069 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.