brainstorm

A structured way to generate many possible solutions to a problem while requiring each idea to use a genuinely different approach. It also researches existing approaches so familiar ideas can be excluded.

In plain words
What is it for?
Exploring product or technical solutions, generating alternatives, comparing ideas with prior work, and developing features when the usual approaches are not enough.
Why use it?
It helps move beyond the first obvious solution and reduces the chance of producing several versions of the same idea.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,470 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 $0.00067 $0.01470
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00735
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00294
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00147

Measured 2d ago against content hash 26ed7ff33df9, 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 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.

source/skills/brainstorm/SKILL.md · 142 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 142 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. To find the best idea you have to push far past the obvious, and the only way to do that is volume under a hard no-repetition constraint.

Arguments

[count] "problem statement"

  • A leading integer sets the idea target (default 30).
  • The rest is the problem to explore.
  • No problem given: ask the user what to brainstorm.

The one rule: shape uniqueness

Every new idea must differ in shape from:

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

"Shape" is 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.

Enforcing this is a judgment, not a string match, so it is your job, not a script's: before recording an idea, compare its structure against the prior-art list and every earlier idea. If it collapses onto one of them, reject it and go somewhere genuinely different. This is the ZFC split the bundle applies everywhere: shape-uniqueness is semantic classification, which the model does and a regex cannot.

Tracking state (no backend required)

Keep the session in one markdown file, .brainstorm/<slug>.md in the working directory, so it survives across turns and can be resumed:

  • Prior art — the structurally distinct known approaches (title, one-line why-it-works, source).
  • Ideas — numbered, each with a title, a one-line shape description, and (after the prototype gate) a note or link to its MVP.
  • Ratings — once converging, Feasibility / Novelty / Impact per idea.

That file is the whole store. No database, no external CLI.

Rules of engagement

  1. No premature judgment. During divergence, never dismiss, critique, or filter. Every idea gets recorded. "That won't work" is banned until converge.
  2. Volume before quality. Most ideas will be bad. That is the point.
  3. Enforce the shape gate honestly. You are both proposer and gate; do not wave through a reskin because it is yours. When an idea repeats a shape, push further.
  4. Separate diverge from converge. Evaluate only after all ideas are captured.
  5. Be a partner, not a scribe. Offer ideas, riff, keep the energy up.

Read the full file on GitHub · 142 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 · 142 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 26ed7ff33df9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository sjarmak/coding-agent-workflows (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 1,470 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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