brainstorming

A guided process for developing an idea into a detailed design and specification through conversation. It first examines the project, asks focused questions, compares possible approaches, and develops the design in sections.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape a product, feature, or software project, explore alternative designs, clarify requirements, and produce an implementation-ready specification.
Why use it?
It helps turn an incomplete idea into clear requirements and decisions before implementation begins. The step-by-step questions also expose missing constraints and success criteria.

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/jtsang4/efficient-coding/brainstorming
Any agent
npx skills add jtsang4/efficient-coding --skill brainstorming
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jtsang4/efficient-coding

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 564 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 80% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00046 $0.00564
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00282
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00113
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00056

Measured yesterday against content hash 81f004b7f1d9, 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 yesterday.

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.

Origin

This is a copy

80% identical to brainstorming — 5 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md · 56 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 56 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs

Overview

Help turn ideas into fully formed designs and specs through natural collaborative dialogue.

Start by understanding the current project context, then ask questions one at a time to refine the idea. Once you understand what you're building, present the design in small sections (200-300 words), checking after each section whether it looks right so far.

The Process

Understanding the idea:

  • Check out the current project state first (files, docs, recent commits)
  • Ask questions one at a time to refine the idea
  • Prefer multiple choice questions when possible, but open-ended is fine too
  • Only one question per message - if a topic needs more exploration, break it into multiple questions
  • Focus on understanding: purpose, constraints, success criteria

Exploring approaches:

  • Propose 2-3 different approaches with trade-offs
  • Present options conversationally with your recommendation and reasoning
  • Lead with your recommended option and explain why

Presenting the design:

  • Once you believe you understand what you're building, present the design
  • Break it into sections of 200-300 words
  • Ask after each section whether it looks right so far
  • Cover: architecture, components, data flow, error handling, testing
  • Be ready to go back and clarify if something doesn't make sense

After the Design

Documentation:

  • Write the validated design to docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md
  • Use elements-of-style:writing-clearly-and-concisely skill if available
  • Commit the design document to git

Implementation (if continuing):

  • Ask: "Ready to set up for implementation?"
  • Delegate all worktree operations to the worktree-manager skill.
    • Ask it to create/switch to a dedicated implementation worktree that copies the current working state (uncommitted changes + local deps) so experimentation is isolated and repeatable.
  • Use superpowers:writing-plans to create detailed implementation plan

Key Principles

Read the full file on GitHub · 56 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. yesterday First seen · 56 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 81f004b7f1d9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository jtsang4/efficient-coding (2 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 564 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 80% identical to brainstorming, differing in 5 lines, and is treated as a copy.