brainstorm

brainstorm is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from int2t05/engineering-skills. It costs 75 tokens per session (1,559 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided conversation for turning a vague creative idea into a clear proposal. It asks one question at a time and checks what you want, who it is for, how success will be measured, and what limits apply.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape a new feature or project, refine an idea, or stress-test your thinking. It is not intended for clear, small requests or simple information questions.
Why use it?
It helps uncover missing details before planning or coding begins, when changing direction is cheaper. It avoids silently guessing requirements.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Installs and runs on its own, but its text points at files inside its plugin — anything it tells you to read at a ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} path is only there once the plugin is installed. Installing the plugin gets both.

Part of the engineering-skills plugin — 48 skills, 1 agent, 1 hook shipped together

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/int2t05/engineering-skills/brainstorm
Any agent
npx skills add int2t05/engineering-skills --skill brainstorm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/int2t05/engineering-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install engineering-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 48 skills, 1 agent, 1 hook.

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/int2t05/engineering-skills/brainstorm.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/int2t05/engineering-skills/brainstorm)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/int2t05/engineering-skills/brainstorm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/int2t05/engineering-skills/brainstorm.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,559 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 $0.00075 $0.01559
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00779
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00312
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00156

Measured 5d ago against content hash 0a2ae1f35f62, 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 5d 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/01-product/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 108 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 108 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstorm

Sharpen a vague idea into a confirmed proposal through one-question-at-a-time dialogue. The cheapest moment to find ambiguity is before any plan, spec, or code exists — once building starts, switching costs lock in the wrong thing.

When to use

  • The ask is underspecified — missing who, why, what success looks like, or the binding constraint.
  • New feature, project, or "refine this idea" / "stress-test my thinking."
  • User says "brainstorm", "grill me", "interview me", "refine this idea", "头脑风暴", "帮我打磨想法", or "盘问我".
  • You're tempted to silently fill ambiguous requirements before a spec exists.

Not for: unambiguous asks ("rename this variable"), pure info requests, or when the user has explicitly asked for speed over verification.

Steps

  1. Hypothesize with a confidence number. If in a codebase, explore project context first (Glob/Grep/Read for architecture, patterns, constraints) before forming the hypothesis. Before asking anything, write your best read of what the user wants in one sentence, plus an honest confidence (0–100%):

    HYPOTHESIS: You want a way to answer "how are we doing?" in standup, and "dashboard" was the convention that came to mind.
    CONFIDENCE: ~30% — missing: who it's for, what "metrics" means, what success looks like
    

    Below ~70%, append what's still unresolved. The number forces honesty — if you can't predict the user's reaction to the next three questions, the number is wrong.

  2. Ask ONE question, with a guess attached.

    Q: <one focused question>
    GUESS: <your hypothesis for the answer, with reasoning>
    

    One question per message — never a batch. Batching encourages skim-reading and surface answers; the third question often depends on the first. Attach a guess so the user reacts to a wrong hypothesis faster than generating from scratch. Be visibly willing to be wrong.

  3. Listen for "want vs. should want." The most dangerous answers pattern-match best-practice talk ("scalable", "clean architecture", "the standard approach") without specifics. When you hear these, ask: "If you didn't have to justify this to anyone, what would you actually want?" That question often does more work than the previous five. For structured problem-validation methods — the Mom Test interview (past behavior, not future opinion), JTBD switching interview, opportunity-solution tree, working backwards / PR-FAQ — load references/discovery-methods.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 108 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 5d ago First seen · 108 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A 0a2ae1f35f62

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository int2t05/engineering-skills (3 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 1,559 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.