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.
When & Why to Use This Skill
This Claude skill facilitates the transition from raw ideas to structured technical designs. It ensures a thorough exploration of user intent and requirements through iterative dialogue, helping developers and architects define system architecture, components, and data flows before implementation to ensure alignment and reduce technical debt.
Use Cases
- Feature Planning: Refining vague feature requests into concrete technical specifications by exploring trade-offs and constraints.
- System Architecture: Designing the interaction between new components and existing infrastructure with a focus on data flow and error handling.
- Requirement Gathering: Using structured, one-at-a-time questioning to uncover hidden project requirements and success criteria.
- Design Documentation: Automatically generating and committing standardized design documents (plans) to the project repository for team alignment.
| 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?"
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