brainstorming

A protocol for clarifying complex or vague requests before building anything. It asks decision-focused questions, records progress, and reports problems in plain language.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before coding new, sizeable, or unclear work to define scope, surface trade-offs, check prior project decisions, and keep the user informed.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of implementing the wrong feature when the request leaves important choices or requirements unspecified.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,523 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 $0.00086 $0.01523
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00762
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00305
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00152

Measured yesterday against content hash 56bed98fce5a, 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.

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.

aim/templates/aim-agents/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.

Pre-Build Questioning & Communication

Treat this as a checkpoint you must pass through before writing code for anything complex, underspecified, or new.

Two responsibilities live here:

  1. Ask first. Surface the decisions that shape an implementation before committing to one.
  2. Stay legible. Report progress, failures, and outcomes in a way the user can act on.

🛑 The Questioning Gate

What flips the gate on

Incoming request Required move
"Build / create / make X" with thin detail 🛑 Pose ~3 questions first
A sizeable feature or architectural choice 🛑 Pin down direction before coding
"Change / update / tweak X" 🛑 Lock the scope before touching it
Fuzzy or open-ended ask 🛑 Probe purpose, audience, limits

Step 0 — Consult memory first

Before generating any questions, look for accumulated context so you don't re-ask what's already settled:

CHECK: Is .aim-agents/memory/MEMORY.md present?
  ├─ Found → Read its index, quietly reuse relevant prior decisions,
  │           and drop any question the memory already answers.
  └─ Absent → Run the full gate below as normal.

The gate, step by step

  1. HALT — resist the urge to start coding.
  2. RECALL — scan .aim-agents/memory/ for anything already decided on this topic.
  3. PROBE — raise at least three questions (omitting ones memory has covered):
    • 🎯 Purpose — which problem does this solve?
    • 👥 Audience — who actually uses it?
    • 📦 Scope — what's essential versus optional?
  4. PAUSE — wait for the reply before moving on.
  5. PERSIST — once the direction is clear, record the calls made with /remember [decision].

This gate is the backbone of the /brainstorm workflow.


🧠 Building Questions on the Fly

⛔ Canned question lists are off-limits. Every question is generated from the actual request. The full method lives in dynamic-questioning.md; the essentials:

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. yesterday First seen · 180 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 56bed98fce5a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository phuonghx/aim-cli (1 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 1,523 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 2026-08-31.

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