brainstorming

A guided discussion process for turning an idea into an agreed design and specification before implementation begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Exploring project context, asking focused questions, designing features or interfaces, and getting approval before coding.
Why use it?
It helps clarify goals and requirements early, reducing the risk of building the wrong feature or making unexamined assumptions.

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

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 2,212 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 81% 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 $0.02212
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01106
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00442
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00221

Measured 2d ago against content hash e0209c27721b, 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.

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

81% identical to brainstorming — 84 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.

skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 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 visual companion (if topic will involve visual questions) — this is its own message, not combined with a clarifying question. 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/superpowers/specs/YYYY-MM-DD--design.md and commit
  7. Spec review loop — dispatch spec-document-reviewer subagent with precisely crafted review context (never your session history); fix issues and re-dispatch until approved (max 3 iterations, then surface to human)
  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 · 166 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. 2d ago First seen · 166 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A e0209c27721b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository shobcoder/shob (582 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 2,212 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 81% identical to brainstorming, differing in 84 lines, and is treated as a copy.