brainstorm-first

brainstorm-first is a skill for Claude Code from thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills. It costs 73 tokens per session (1,733 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A decision-making workflow for uncertain or high-impact coding requests. It creates three practical options, checks their real-world fit, recommends one, and waits for the user to choose.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare approaches, diagnose problems, plan UI ideas, or clarify an ambiguous request before implementation.
Why use it?
It prevents coding from starting before important product, technical, cost, accessibility, or security choices are considered. It also avoids treating an impractical suggestion as the answer.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the project-development-skills plugin — 11 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to compare approaches, diagnose problems, plan UI ideas, or clarify an ambiguous request before implementation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills/brainstorm-first
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 thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills --skill brainstorm-first
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install project-development-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 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-first

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills/brainstorm-first/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills/brainstorm-first)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills/brainstorm-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills/brainstorm-first/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-first

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills/brainstorm-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills/brainstorm-first.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,733 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 13
    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 $0.00073 $0.01733
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00866
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00347
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00173

Measured 12d ago against content hash 53209f10583c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brainstorm-first 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 12d 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/project-development-skills/skills/brainstorm-first/SKILL.md · 144 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 144 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstorm First

Turn an uncertain request into a reality-checked decision before implementation. Preserve the user's goal, but do not endorse an impractical feature or preferred solution merely because the user proposed it.

Non-negotiable gates

  • Do not change project or external state, make purchases, deploy, or take other implementation actions before the user chooses an option. Read-only discovery and safe diagnostic checks are allowed when they help clarify the decision. In UI/UX concept mode, temporary preview images explicitly requested for comparison are also allowed, but do not treat them as production assets or add them to the project before selection.
  • Inspect available context before asking questions. Do not ask the user for facts that can be found safely in supplied artifacts, the repository, logs, configuration, or authoritative documentation.
  • Do not silently assume a material product, architecture, behavior, scope, cost, or design choice. State unresolved material assumptions and ask about them.
  • Challenge requirements when evidence, constraints, user value, accessibility, security, maintenance, compatibility, cost, or operational reality makes the current request weak. Explain the concrete issue and offer a better framing; do not be contrarian without evidence.
  • Present exactly three meaningfully different, viable options and recommend one. Do not create cosmetic variants merely to reach three.
  • Include the required scores and deductions in every completed decision package after the brief is decision-ready. Do not score an incomplete clarification turn. Scores are structured judgments, not measured facts; do not inflate them or imply false precision.
  • After presenting the decision package, stop and wait for the user to choose, revise, or reject the options. Do not continue with the recommendation automatically.

Workflow

1. Route and investigate

Choose the mode that owns the uncertainty:

  • Requirements: unclear scope, product behavior, architecture, workflow, or implementation direction.
  • Diagnosis: a bug, failure, regression, or unexpected behavior whose cause is not yet established.
  • UI/UX concepts: the user wants three visual interface directions before implementation.

Read the full file on GitHub · 144 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. 12d ago First seen · 144 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A 53209f10583c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm-first is a skill published in the GitHub repository thienanblog/awesome-ai-agent-skills (65 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 1,733 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

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