brainstorming-codex

Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs

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 and get user approval.

Codex integration: Call the codex_research MCP tool for bounded repository research in Step 1. Claude stays in the main thread for all interactive and judgment work.

Anti-Pattern: "This Is Too Simple To Need A Design"

Every project goes through this process. A todo list, a single-function utility, a config change — all of them. "Simple" projects are where unexamined assumptions cause the most wasted work. The design can be short (a few sentences for truly simple projects), but you MUST present it and get approval.

Checklist

You MUST create a task for each of these items and complete them in order:

1. Explore project context — call the codex_research MCP tool. Pass a full prompt body that names the repository areas to inspect and the question to answer. Example call:

{
  "tool": "codex_research",
  "arguments": {
    "prompt": "Research the forwarding contract around scripts/, agents/, and tests/prompt-contracts/. Explain how brainstorming, planning, implementation, review, debugging, and branch analysis currently reach Codex. Call out any place where the skill docs still tell Claude to run commands directly.",
    "workspaceRoot": "/absolute/path/to/your/repo"
  }
}

1. Ask clarifying questions — one at a time, understand purpose/constraints/success criteria
2. Propose 2-3 approaches — with trade-offs and your recommendation
3. Present design — in sections scaled to their complexity, get user approval after each section
4. Write design doc — save to docs/superpowers/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md using design-template.md; commit
5. Spec self-review — quick inline check for placeholders, contradictions, ambiguity, scope (see below)
6. User reviews written spec — ask user to review the spec file before proceeding
7. Transition to implementation — invoke superpowers-cc-to-codex:writing-plans-codex skill to create implementation plan