brainstorming

A guided conversation for turning an unfinished idea into an agreed design or specification before implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps clarify user intent, explore alternatives, classify the size of the request, and present a design or write a spec for approval.
Why use it?
It exposes missing requirements and open decisions early, reducing the chance of building the wrong feature or repeatedly changing its behavior.

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/missingpackage/nightshift/brainstorming
Any agent
npx skills add MissingPackage/nightshift --skill brainstorming
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MissingPackage/nightshift

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,961 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 91% 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 $0.00052 $0.03961
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01980
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00792
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00396

Measured yesterday against content hash 4c0522847148, 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (scripts/helper.js, scripts/server.cjs, scripts/start-server.sh, …), 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.

Origin

This is a copy

91% identical to brainstorming — 53 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/vendored/brainstorming/SKILL.md · 286 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 286 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs

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

Start by classifying how much process the request needs, then work through your path: understand the context, refine the idea, present a design, and get your human partner's approval.

Exception: work that executes an already-approved spec, an already-approved PHASES row, or an explicit docket ruling is past this gate. The design was agreed; re-opening it is not diligence, it is a stall.

Three Paths

Before your first question, classify the request and say the classification out loud — "this looks bounded, so I'll present a short design here rather than write a spec" — so your human partner can override it:

  • Spike — a feasibility question ("can we...", "is it possible...", "quick and dirty is fine") whose output is an answer, not code you keep. Present the question and what you'll try in 2-3 sentences, get a nod, then find out as cheaply as correctness allows. No design doc, no spec file. Report findings as a recommendation; anything you built stays labeled throwaway.
  • Bounded — a well-scoped change to code that already exists in this repo: a new flag, a small endpoint, a one-file fix. Understanding the kind of app is not enough — bounded means the flow you are changing is already here to read. If there is no existing flow to change, the task is not bounded. Ask the clarifying questions that matter, present a short design IN CHAT (a few sentences to a few short paragraphs), and STOP. Implementation starts only after your human partner says yes to that design — a bounded task's approval is as hard a gate as an architectural one. No spec file, no implementation plan document.
  • Architectural — new projects, new subsystems, changes that restructure how components fit together or alter interfaces others depend on. Follow the full process: questions, approaches, sectioned design, written spec, then the writing-plans skill.

Read the full file on GitHub · 286 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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. yesterday First seen · 286 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 4c0522847148

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository MissingPackage/nightshift (2 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 3,961 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to brainstorming, differing in 53 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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