brainstorming

A planning process for turning a coding idea into an agreed design before implementation begins. It explores the project, asks focused questions, and produces a specification.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before adding features, building components, changing behavior, or making even small configuration changes.
Why use it?
It helps reveal unclear requirements and hidden assumptions before code is written, reducing rework.

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

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 2,073 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 83% 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 $0.00037 $0.02073
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01037
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00415
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00207

Measured 3d ago against content hash 10be19c0c3bb, 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 3d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

83% identical to brainstorming — 120 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.

.codex/skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md · 180 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 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 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.

Do NOT invoke any implementation skill, write any code, scaffold any project, or take any implementation action until you have presented a design and the user has approved it. This applies to EVERY project regardless of perceived simplicity.

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 — check files, docs, recent commits

  2. Offer the visual companion just-in-time — NOT upfront. The first time a question would genuinely be clearer shown than described, offer it then (its own message); on approval its browser tab opens for you. If no visual question ever arises, never offer it. See the Visual Companion section below.

  3. Ask clarifying questions — one at a time, understand purpose/constraints/success criteria

  4. Propose 2-3 approaches — with trade-offs and your recommendation

  5. Present design — in sections scaled to their complexity, get user approval after each section

  6. Write design doc — save to docs/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md and commit

  7. Spec self-review — quick inline check for placeholders, contradictions, ambiguity, scope (see below)

  8. User reviews written spec — ask user to review the spec file before proceeding

  9. Transition to implementation — invoke writing-plans skill to create implementation plan

Read the full file on GitHub · 180 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. 3d ago First seen · 180 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 10be19c0c3bb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository peintune/runjam (128 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 2,073 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 83% identical to brainstorming, differing in 120 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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