brainstorm

brainstorm is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from melodic-software/claude-code-plugins. It costs 102 tokens per session (1,091 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A brainstorming guide for exploring software or product approaches before choosing a scope.

In plain words
What is it for?
It grounds candidate approaches in the codebase, orders them from least to most ambitious, and records which options the user prefers.
Why use it?
It reveals options and hidden decision criteria before implementation makes a costly direction hard to change.

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 planning plugin — 10 skills 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/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/brainstorm
Any agent
npx skills add melodic-software/claude-code-plugins --skill brainstorm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install planning, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills.

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/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/brainstorm.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/brainstorm)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/brainstorm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/brainstorm.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,091 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 $0.00102 $0.01091
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.00545
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00218
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00109

Measured yesterday against content hash e4d7c2fa0ba9, 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 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.

plugins/planning/skills/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 39 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 39 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

The divergence step before any scoping: unknown-knowns (criteria the user only recognizes when seen) surface cheapest at candidate-list time. Finding one mid-implementation costs a re-plan. A brainstorm round also calibrates scope: reacting to a cheapest→most-ambitious spread prevents locking a scope that is too narrow (missed the high-value approach) or too wide (ambition the problem doesn't need).

Opening a fresh session on a rough problem with a brainstorm is a citable practice, not a detour: the cheapest→ambitious spread is the cheapest artifact that surfaces criteria the user only recognizes when seen (rationale and sources: docs/FINDING-YOUR-UNKNOWNS.md in the marketplace repository).

Distinct neighbors: /planning:design Phase 1 decomposes the problem space WITHIN a design task already chosen; a proactive architecture-friction scan (e.g. /architecture:improve, if installed) hunts on its own lanes; a UI-variation prototyper (e.g. /prototype:explore-directions, if installed) builds visual variations of a chosen direction. This skill is the general, problem-shaped entry upstream of all three. Creative-domain ideation owned by a domain skill (e.g. songwriting brainstorms → /songwriting:workflow, if installed) stays with that skill.

Task

Rough problem: $ARGUMENTS (if empty, infer from conversation; if nothing rough is open, say so and stop).

  1. Intake. Restate the problem in one sentence; if the user's starting point is unknown, ask ONE question to establish where they are. This is divergence, not an interview.
  2. Ground. Fast breadth pass (Glob/Grep/targeted Read; survey the file landscape before reading anything in depth) over where the problem lives: entry points, existing mechanisms that already partially address it, prior art in the repo.
  3. Diverge. Generate the candidate list (default ~10; scale to the problem), ordered cheapest → most ambitious. Every candidate is codebase-grounded and names the files/mechanisms it would touch, one line each: what, where, effort tier, expected impact. Do not self-censor the ambitious end; the user calibrates, not you.
  4. React. The user marks what resonates. A prose numbered list is the default reaction surface; for a large or multi-axis spread, offer a self-contained HTML reaction-capture page (checkable candidates + a copy-out of the selection), rendered to the topic-docs ephemeral tier, never the memory slice, even when the user opts into persisting brainstorm.md there. The conversation record stays authoritative. Placement and rules: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/reference/topic-docs.md.
  5. Calibrate and hand off. From the resonating candidates, propose a scope and route onward: /planning:prd (product intent still fuzzy), /planning:interview (engineering contract), /planning:design (type/module decisions), or a feasibility/visual spike (/prototype:pressure-test / /prototype:explore-directions if installed; otherwise a throwaway spike you write and discard). State the recommended route with its basis, marked (RECOMMENDED).

Read the full file on GitHub · 39 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. yesterday First seen · 39 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A e4d7c2fa0ba9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository melodic-software/claude-code-plugins (15 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 1,091 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 2026-09-03.

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