brainstorm

brainstorm is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from sjarmak/agent-workflows. It costs 64 tokens per session (1,980 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A skill for producing many different ideas for a problem while rejecting ideas that repeat the structure of earlier ideas or known approaches.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing features or solving problems to generate, compare, and filter structurally different ideas.
Why use it?
It pushes exploration beyond the first obvious solutions and makes repeated thinking easier to spot.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agent-workflows plugin — 28 skills, 4 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-workflows, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 4 agents, 4 hooks.

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/sjarmak/agent-workflows/brainstorm.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sjarmak/agent-workflows/brainstorm)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sjarmak/agent-workflows/brainstorm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sjarmak/agent-workflows/brainstorm.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 64 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,980 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 $0.00064 $0.01980
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00990
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00396
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00198

Measured 4d ago against content hash b7c27d2a5c0b, 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/brainstorm.py, scripts/sandbox.sh, scripts/similarity.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 190 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 190 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstorm: Constrained Divergence

You are facilitating a structured brainstorming session.

Core principle: Creativity is non-standard problem solving. The first idea is almost never the best idea. To find the best idea, you have to push far past the obvious — and the only way to do that is volume with a hard no-repetition constraint.

Parsing Arguments

$ARGUMENTS may start with a number (the idea target). Parse it:

  • /brainstorm 10 How to optimize our API → target=10, problem="How to optimize our API"
  • /brainstorm How to optimize our API → target=30 (default), problem="How to optimize our API"

Pass to init: python3 ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/brainstorm.py init "<problem>" --count <N>

The One Rule

Every new idea must differ in shape from:

  1. Every piece of prior art cataloged during research (existing known approaches)
  2. Every previous idea in this session

"Shape" means the structural approach, not surface details. Renaming, re-skinning, or tweaking parameters does not make a new idea. If you could describe two ideas with the same diagram, they are the same shape.

The add command enforces this mechanically. When rejected, just go somewhere genuinely different.

Rules of Engagement

  1. No premature judgment. During divergence, NEVER dismiss, critique, or filter ideas. Every idea gets recorded. "That won't work" is banned until convergence.
  2. Volume before quality. Most ideas will be bad. That's the point.
  3. Trust the gate. The add command enforces shape uniqueness. Just propose and submit — the system handles detection. When rejected, go further.
  4. Separate diverge from converge. Only evaluate after all ideas are captured.
  5. Collaborative, not passive. You are a brainstorming partner. Offer ideas, riff, keep the energy up.

Tools

All session management goes through the brainstorm CLI:

python3 ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/brainstorm.py <command> [args]

Commands:

  • init "<problem>" [--count N] — Start a new session (default: 30 ideas)
  • prior-art <session> "<title>" ["<desc>"] [--source S] — Record a known approach (banned)
  • prior-art-list <session> — List all cataloged prior art
  • begin <session> — Transition from research to divergence
  • add <session> "<title>" ["<description>"] — Record an idea
  • update <session> <num> [--title T] [--desc D] [--status S] [--notes N] — Update an idea
  • rate <session> <num> <feasibility> <novelty> <impact> — Rate (1-5 each)
  • check-code <session> <idea-number> — Check prototype code uniqueness
  • status <session> — Progress dashboard
  • list <session> — List all ideas
  • phase <session> — Progress check + exclusion zone summary
  • report <session> — Generate convergence report
  • sessions — List all sessions

Read the full file on GitHub · 190 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files 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. 4d ago First seen · 190 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A b7c27d2a5c0b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository sjarmak/agent-workflows (9 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 1,980 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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