brainstorming

A guided planning skill for turning an idea into a design or implementation plan before changing code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for feasibility investigations, bounded changes to an existing codebase, and larger feature or component work that needs agreement first.
Why use it?
It helps clarify the intended result and requirements before work begins, especially when the scope or design is uncertain.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,404 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 $0.00037 $0.03404
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01702
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00681
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00340

Measured 2d ago against content hash 74edf03ea6d2, 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 2d ago.

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

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md · 251 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 251 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.

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 · 251 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. 2d ago First seen · 251 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 74edf03ea6d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository obra/superpowers (280,216 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 3,404 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.

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