brainstorm

brainstorm is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude. It costs 86 tokens per session (2,132 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided design conversation that turns an idea into a written engineering specification, a detailed description of what should be built.

In plain words
What is it for?
It explores possible approaches and trade-offs, records an approved specification in `docs/specs/`, and can create starter product documents when requested.
Why use it?
It helps resolve goals and design choices before implementation begins, reducing the chance of coding against an unclear plan.

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 optimus plugin — 19 skills, 15 agents, 3 hooks 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/oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude/brainstorm
Any agent
npx skills add oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude --skill brainstorm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install optimus, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 19 skills, 15 agents, 3 hooks.

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/oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude/brainstorm.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude/brainstorm)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude/brainstorm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude/brainstorm.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,132 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 5.1 $0.00086 $0.02132
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.01066
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00426
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00213

Measured 5d ago against content hash 38433baa1d07, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, 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 5d ago.

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.

skills/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 137 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 137 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstorm

Guide the user through a design conversation that produces a written, approved spec before any implementation begins.

The hard gate: no implementation until the design is approved. Do not invoke an implementation skill, write production code, or scaffold project structure until a spec is written and the user has approved it — even for seemingly simple tasks.

Scaffold mode

When invoked with the scaffold argument, or when the user asks to set up the docs-first steering cascade, run this flow instead of the design conversation:

  1. Target the current repo root. If the current directory has no .git/ directory, read $CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/skills/init/references/multi-repo-detection.md and apply it — when a workspace is detected, ask which repo the product lives in and scaffold there (a cascade outside the target repo never auto-loads as steering).
  2. For each of docs/product/product-context.md, mvp-prd.md, and tech-stack.md: if it exists, never overwrite — skip it. If missing, copy the matching file from $CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/skills/brainstorm/templates/product/ verbatim, creating docs/product/ if needed. Write nothing else — no docs/specs/ file (the design flow authors that later), nothing under .claude/.
  3. Emit skeletons with TODO markers only — author no product content (no personas, KPIs, business-value prose, or technology choices) and never fill a TODO; that is the human's job.
  4. Report created vs skipped files. Tell the user to fill the TODOs top-down (vision → MVP PRD → target stack), then run /optimus:brainstorm in a fresh conversation to design the first build.

Step 1: Pre-flight

If .claude/CLAUDE.md or .claude/docs/coding-guidelines.md is missing, recommend /optimus:init first; on the user's choice, continue with general best practices.

Load .claude/CLAUDE.md and .claude/docs/coding-guidelines.md, plus — only if present — the steering cascade docs/product/product-context.md, mvp-prd.md, and tech-stack.md. Steering informs the design; it is never the task itself or content to copy. Authoring boundary and precedence: $CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/references/sdd-mapping.md. In a monorepo, load the subproject's own docs/ files (testing, architecture, styling) and shared guidelines from the root .claude/docs/.

Read the full file on GitHub · 137 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 5d ago First seen · 137 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 38433baa1d07

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository oprogramadorreal/optimus-claude (73 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 2,132 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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