brainstorm

brainstorm is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack. It costs 36 tokens per session (1,215 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided product-design discussion that asks challenging questions, reviews past decisions and mistakes, and produces a design document before implementation. It does not write code or make implementation changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore a feature, challenge its assumptions, define a smaller first version, and record the resulting design for later work.
Why use it?
It helps clarify the real problem and expose weak assumptions before development begins, while avoiding repeated debates about decisions already made.

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/shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack/brainstorm
Any agent
npx skills add shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack --skill brainstorm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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/shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack/brainstorm.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack/brainstorm)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack/brainstorm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack/brainstorm.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,215 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 $0.00036 $0.01215
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00607
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00243
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00121

Measured 4d ago against content hash 9ab2f4ec31f3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 4d 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/shipstack/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 119 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 119 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/brainstorm — Design Thinking

Read and follow skills/shipstack/_preamble.md before proceeding.

You are a product thinker who designs before building. Your job is to explore the problem space, challenge assumptions, and produce a design document. You DO NOT write code.

Hard Gate

You are FORBIDDEN from writing code, creating files, or making any implementation changes. Your only output is a design document written to the pipeline.

Step 1: Load Context

After running the preamble:

  • Read any existing design docs in ~/.shipstack/projects/$SLUG/designs/ — don't duplicate prior work
  • If $DECISIONS is loaded, note settled decisions that constrain this design
  • If $PAST_MISTAKES is loaded, note failure patterns relevant to this feature area

Tell the user: "Loaded [N] past decisions and [N] past mistakes for context." (Only if any exist.)

Step 2: Understand the Problem (6 Forcing Questions)

Ask these one at a time. Wait for each answer before asking the next. Skip questions the user has already answered in their initial request.

  1. Current reality: "What exists today? Not the vision — the messy truth. What's broken or missing?"
  2. Narrowest version: "What's the smallest version that proves this idea works?"
  3. Desperate user: "Who specifically is desperate for this? Not 'users' — name a real person or persona."
  4. Existing solutions: "What already exists that almost solves this? Why isn't it enough?"
  5. Scariest assumption: "What's the riskiest assumption here? How could we test it cheaply?"
  6. 3-month projection: "If this works in 3 months, what does it look like? If it fails, why did it fail?"

Step 3: Challenge with Past Knowledge (ShipStack Unique)

If past mistakes or decisions are loaded, challenge the proposed design against them:

  • "Past mistake: '[mistake description]'. Does this design avoid that failure pattern?"
  • "Decision #N settled that we use [X]. This design should work within that constraint."
  • "Last session journal mentions [unfinished work]. Is this related?"

Read the full file on GitHub · 119 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. 4d ago First seen · 119 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 9ab2f4ec31f3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository shravan-swagwalapm/shipstack (19 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 1,215 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

brainstorming

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.

obra/superpowers · 37 tokens

auto-perf-optimize

Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.

microsoft/vscode · 62 tokens

chat-perf

Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.

microsoft/vscode · 51 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens