💡 Summary
A structured conversational agent skill that guides users from initial ideas to validated design specifications through incremental questioning and collaborative refinement.
🎯 Target Audience
🤖 AI Roast: “This skill is less a brainstorming session and more a design interrogation under a very polite lamp.”
Risk: The skill writes design documents to a fixed path (`docs/plans/`). An attacker could potentially inject malicious content or path traversal sequences into the design topic to write files elsewhere. Mitigation: Sanitize the user-provided `<topic>` input to allow only alphanumeric characters and hyphens before using it in the file path.
name: brainstorming description: "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."
Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs
Overview
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 in small sections (200-300 words), checking after each section whether it looks right so far.
The Process
Understanding the idea:
- Check out the current project state first (files, docs, recent commits)
- Ask questions one at a time to refine the idea
- Prefer multiple choice questions when possible, but open-ended is fine too
- Only one question per message - if a topic needs more exploration, break it into multiple questions
- Focus on understanding: purpose, constraints, success criteria
Exploring approaches:
- Propose 2-3 different approaches with trade-offs
- Present options conversationally with your recommendation and reasoning
- Lead with your recommended option and explain why
Presenting the design:
- Once you believe you understand what you're building, present the design
- Break it into sections of 200-300 words
- Ask after each section whether it looks right so far
- Cover: architecture, components, data flow, error handling, testing
- Be ready to go back and clarify if something doesn't make sense
After the Design
Documentation:
- Write the validated design to
docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md - Use elements-of-style:writing-clearly-and-concisely skill if available
- Commit the design document to git
Implementation (if continuing):
- Ask: "Ready to set up for implementation?"
- Use superpowers:using-git-worktrees to create isolated workspace
- Use superpowers:writing-plans to create detailed implementation plan
Key Principles
- One question at a time - Don't overwhelm with multiple questions
- Multiple choice preferred - Easier to answer than open-ended when possible
- YAGNI ruthlessly - Remove unnecessary features from all designs
- Explore alternatives - Always propose 2-3 approaches before settling
- Incremental validation - Present design in sections, validate each
- Be flexible - Go back and clarify when something doesn't make sense
Pros
- Enforces a disciplined, step-by-step design process reducing ambiguity.
- Integrates with project context (files, git) for grounded discussions.
- Promotes validation through incremental presentation and feedback loops.
Cons
- Process may feel overly rigid or slow for simple, well-understood tasks.
- Relies on user engagement; passive users may stall the conversation.
- Tight coupling to specific file paths (docs/plans/) limits flexibility.
Disclaimer: This content is sourced from GitHub open source projects for display and rating purposes only.
Copyright belongs to the original author obra.