brainstorm

brainstorm is a skill for Claude Code from ggemba/squad-mcp. It costs 0 tokens per session (3,818 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A planning aid for exploring a product or engineering question before coding. It compares several possible approaches using web research and specialist viewpoints, then produces a sourced recommendation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare 3–5 solutions, examine industry patterns and risks, and create an options matrix with supporting sources.
Why use it?
It helps clarify what to build, weigh build-versus-buy choices, and uncover trade-offs before implementation begins.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the squad plugin — 10 skills, 14 commands, 12 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to compare 3–5 solutions, examine industry patterns and risks, and…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ggemba/squad-mcp/brainstorm
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.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install squad, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills, 14 commands, 12 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for brainstorm

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ggemba/squad-mcp/brainstorm.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ggemba/squad-mcp/brainstorm)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ggemba/squad-mcp/brainstorm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ggemba/squad-mcp/brainstorm.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,818 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00000 $0.03818
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01909
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00764
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00382

Measured 6d ago against content hash bd4e7be00721, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, 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 6d 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.

skills/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 348 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 348 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: Brainstorm

Objective

Help the user think through a problem, decision, or implementation idea by running parallel web research (market patterns, best practices, pitfalls, examples) and gathering specialist agent perspectives, then synthesizing the findings into a structured options matrix with a recommendation. This skill is exploratory — it does not write code, run tests, or modify the repo.

Position in the workflow:

  • /brainstorm → decide what to build (this skill)
  • /squad:implement → implement what was decided
  • /squad:review → review what was implemented

Inviolable Rules

  1. No code implementation. This skill produces a brainstorm report. It must not edit files, run scripts, run tests, or modify any user-facing persistent state. The only file this skill ever writes is the journal .squad/runs.jsonl via record_run for telemetry — gitignored, mode 0o600, not user content. Same single-writer pattern as the squad + debug + question skills.
  2. No git commit, git push, or any state-mutating git command. Read-only git is fine (git log, git status, git diff for context).
  3. Cite sources. Every market claim, best practice, statistic, or "industry uses X" assertion must link to the URL it came from. Unsourced claims are not allowed.
  4. Multiple options. Always present at least two alternatives with explicit pros/cons. Never single-answer. The user is brainstorming, not asking for a verdict.
  5. Honest gaps. When research is incomplete or a decision needs more input, surface it explicitly under "Open questions" — do not paper over.
  6. No AI attribution in any artifact produced. Consistent with the global commit-authorship rule: if the brainstorm output ever gets pasted into a commit, doc, or message, it must not carry Co-Authored-By: Claude / Anthropic / AI / Generated with [...] lines.

Inputs

The skill takes one required argument (the topic) and optional flags:

Param Default Description
<topic> required Free-form text describing the problem, decision, or idea to brainstorm
--quick / --normal / --deep --normal --quick (3 web queries, 1 agent), --normal (6 queries, 2-3 agents), --deep (10+ queries, 4 agents + tech-lead). Same vocabulary as /squad:implement and /squad:review.
--no-web off Skip web research entirely. Agents-only mode. Use when offline or when the topic is purely internal-codebase.
--focus <domain> auto Force a domain bias: frontend, backend, infra, data, security, business, mobile. Auto-detection scans the topic text for keywords.
--sources <N> 5 Cap on web sources cited per section. Avoids dump of every result.

Read the full file on GitHub · 348 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. 6d ago First seen · 348 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A bd4e7be00721

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository ggemba/squad-mcp (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 3,818 tokens. 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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