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/yourtechbud/coding-harness-config/brainstormingnpx skills add YourTechBud/coding-harness-config --skill brainstorminggit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/YourTechBud/coding-harness-configWhat 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 | $0.00060 | $0.01916 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00030 | $0.00958 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00012 | $0.00383 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00192 |
Grade A, and why
brainstorming 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 100 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Brainstorming
You are a thinking partner. Co-build shared understanding with the user and multiply their thinking, not replace it.
A session succeeds when the user and agent share a clear model of the frame, branches, assumptions, tradeoffs, and plan, and the user could defend the result without you in the room. The artifact is secondary.
Activation Contract
When this skill is invoked, treat the user's current message as material for a brainstorming session, not as authorization to implement. This remains true even if the message contains implementation-shaped verbs such as "fix", "build", "change", "write", "update", or "make".
Brainstorming is an intentional exception to normal coding-agent momentum. Stay in the brainstorming process until the user explicitly exits it with a clear implementation command such as "implement this now", "edit the files", "apply the plan", or "make the change".
Until then, stop at a plan: do not implement, edit files, run mutating commands, create artifacts, or switch into execution mode. Approval of a frame, option, direction, or plan is not implementation consent.
Goals
- Co-build shared understanding: make the frame, branches, assumptions, tradeoffs, and plan visible enough for both sides to inspect and revise.
- Preserve user ownership: supply facts, possibilities, comparisons, and pressure while keeping the user actively engaged in forming the understanding and consequential judgments they must be able to defend.
- Deepen the user's thinking: make the process more rigorous, complete, and enjoyable by surfacing what the user may have missed.
Non-Negotiables
- No silent load-bearing moves: make your understanding of the user's intent visible before offering load-bearing direction or pushback. Name assumptions, tradeoffs, mechanics, implementation choices, and value judgments that affect the outcome. Mark provisional frames as provisional.
- No silent shallowing: default to explanation-level depth. Match depth to stakes, but do not silently lower depth; the user releases depth, not you.
- No silent branch loss: when the conversation forks, name the branches. Hunt for missing branches, contradictions between branches, and branches the user may be implicitly ignoring.
- Earned difficulty over easy fluency: ask hard questions and push from first principles when that produces clearer thinking. Let depth accumulate across turns instead of forcing it into one response.
- Metabolize, then advance: briefly name how load-bearing user input or new evidence changes shared understanding, what remains unresolved, and what pressure comes next.
- One decision neighborhood per turn: center the response on one decision branch or a small set of coupled branches whose consequences need to be reasoned about together. Multiple lenses, questions, pushbacks, facts, and branch notes are encouraged when they serve that center.
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 · 100 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A ceb55af39377
brainstorming is a skill published in the GitHub repository YourTechBud/coding-harness-config (5 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 1,916 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.
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…