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.
npx agentmods add skills/wrannaman/agentic-engineering/brainstormnpx skills add wrannaman/agentic-engineering --skill brainstormgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wrannaman/agentic-engineeringWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00036 | $0.02616 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00018 | $0.01308 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00007 | $0.00523 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00262 |
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.
This is a copy
73% identical to brainstorming — 94 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 192 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.
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.
KB Retrieval (KB MCP)
If a kb knowledge base MCP is available, use retrieval-led reasoning before proposing approaches:
list_kb_partitions(only if partition is unknown)list_kb_documents(prefer scoped partition)read_kb_document_by_pathfor clearly relevant docsread_kb_document_by_keywordsfor gaps (expand terms; retry up to 3 times)
Call this once during early context gathering, and again only when the conversation introduces a new domain (for example: security, architecture, testing strategy, deployment). Keep retrieval surgical: load only the docs needed for the current design discussion.
Checklist
You MUST create a task for each of these items and complete them in order:
- Explore project context deeply — check files, docs, recent commits
- Prime KB context (if
kbMCP is available) — load index + targeted docs relevant to this task - 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.
- Ask clarifying questions — one at a time, understand purpose/constraints/success criteria
- Propose 2-3 approaches — with trade-offs and your recommendation
- Present design — in sections scaled to their complexity, get user approval after each section
- Write design doc — save to
<agent-settings-directory(.claude|.agents|.codex)>/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md - 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 5 iterations, then surface to human)
- User reviews written spec — ask user to review the spec file before proceeding
- Transition to implementation — invoke plan skill to create implementation plan
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 192 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 5a5a73c26930
brainstorm is a skill published in the GitHub repository wrannaman/agentic-engineering (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 2,616 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 73% identical to brainstorming, differing in 94 lines, and is treated as a copy.
Other skills, from other repositories
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…