brainstorm

brainstorm is a skill for Claude Code from rube-de/cc-skills. It costs 96 tokens per session (4,170 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning aid for unclear software work. It explores possible approaches, discusses trade-offs, and produces an approved written specification before issues or implementation plans are created.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to clarify requirements, compare designs, explore unfamiliar problem areas, and prepare a specification for issue creation or implementation planning.
Why use it?
It prevents vague requests from turning into poorly defined tickets. It also helps decide whether work belongs in one issue or several related issues.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the pm plugin — 5 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to clarify requirements, compare designs, explore unfamiliar problem areas, and prepare a specification for issue creation or implementation planning.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rube-de/cc-skills/brainstorm
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.

Any agent
npx skills add rube-de/cc-skills --skill brainstorm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rube-de/cc-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pm, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

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/rube-de/cc-skills/brainstorm/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rube-de/cc-skills/brainstorm)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rube-de/cc-skills/brainstorm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rube-de/cc-skills/brainstorm/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for brainstorm

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rube-de/cc-skills/brainstorm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rube-de/cc-skills/brainstorm.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,170 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 367
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00096 $0.04170
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.02085
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00834
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00417

Measured 9d ago against content hash 30342beaad06, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, 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 9d 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.

plugins/pm/skills/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 397 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 397 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstorm: Pre-Creation Design Exploration

Explore the problem space, clarify requirements, and converge on a design direction before creating issues. This skill produces a spec document — capturing intent, trade-offs, the chosen approach, and enough detail for both issue creation (/pm) and implementation planning (/cdt).

When to Use

Use this skill when:

  • The work is ambiguous — user knows what they want but not how
  • Multiple valid approaches exist and trade-offs need discussion
  • Scope is unclear — could be one issue or an epic with sub-issues
  • The problem domain is unfamiliar and needs exploration first
  • A request is large enough that jumping straight to issue creation would produce a vague ticket

Do NOT use for:

  • Clear, well-scoped bugs (go directly to /pm)
  • Simple chores or dependency updates
  • Work that already has a design document or spec

Hard Gate

This applies to EVERY brainstorming session regardless of perceived simplicity. A spec can be short (5-10 lines for a simple feature), but it must exist and be approved.

"This Is Too Simple To Need a Spec"

No. Every brainstorming session produces a spec. The spec scales with complexity:

  • Simple feature: 5-10 lines covering approach, scope, and key decisions
  • Medium feature: half a page with trade-off analysis and component breakdown
  • Complex initiative: full spec with architecture, decomposition, and risk assessment

The cost of a 30-second review of a short spec is negligible. The cost of a poorly scoped issue that an agent executes in the wrong direction is significant.

Arguments

If the user provides arguments (e.g., /pm:brainstorm caching layer for API), treat the entire argument string as the initial topic. Use it to focus Step 1 context gathering and to skip obvious clarifications in Step 2. If no arguments are provided, start with an open-ended discovery in Step 2.

Read the full file on GitHub · 397 lines

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. 9d ago First seen · 397 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 30342beaad06

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository rube-de/cc-skills (10 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 4,170 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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