/brainstorming

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."
argument-hint: "<feature-or-idea>"

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.

<HARD-GATE> Do NOT invoke any implementation skill, write any code, scaffold any project, or take any implementation action until you have presented a design and the user has approved it. This applies to EVERY project regardless of perceived simplicity. </HARD-GATE>

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.

Checklist

You MUST create a task for each of these items and complete them in order:

1. **Explore project context** — check files, docs, recent commits 2. **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. 3. **Ask clarifying questions** — one at a time, understand purpose/constraints/success criteria 4. **Propose 2-3 approaches** — with trade-offs and your recommendation 5. **Present design** — in sections scaled to their complexity, get user approval after each section 6. **Write design doc** — save to `docs/ultraship/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md` and commit 7. **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 3 iterations, then surface to human) 8. **User reviews written spec** — ask user to review the spec file before proceeding 9. **Transition to implementation** — invoke writing-plans skill to create implementation plan

Process Flow

digraph brainstorming {
    "Explore project context" [shape=box];
    "Visual questions ahead?" [shape=diamond];
    "Offer Visual Companion\n(own message, no other content)" [shape=box];
    "Ask clarifying questions" [shape=box];
    "Propose 2-3 approaches" [shape=box];
    "Present design sections" [shape=box];
    "User approves design?" [shape=diamond];
    "Write design doc" [shape=box];
    "Spec review loop" [shape=box];
    "Spec review passed?" [shape=diamond];
    "User reviews spec?" [shape=diamond];
    "Invoke writing-plans skill" [shape=doublecircle];

    "Explore project context" -> "Visual questions ahead?";
    "Visual questions ahead?" -> "Offer Visual Companion\n(own message, no other content)" [label="yes"];
    "Visual questions ahead?" -> "Ask clarifying questions" [label="no"];
    "Offer Visual Companion\n(own message, no other content)" -> "Ask clarifying questions";
    "Ask clarifying questions" -> "Propose 2-3 approaches";
    "Propose 2-3 approaches" -> "Present design sections";
    "Present design sections" -> "User approves design?";
    "User approves design?" -> "Present design sections" [label="no, revise"];
    "User approves design?" -> "Write design doc" [label="yes"];
    "Write design doc" -> "Spec review loop";
    "Spec review loop" -> "Spec review passed?";
    "Spec review passed?" -> "Spec review loop" [label="issues found,\nfix and re-dispatch"];
    "Spec review passed?" -> "User reviews spec?" [label="approved"];
    "User reviews spec?" -> "Write design doc" [label="changes requested"];
    "User reviews spec?" -> "Invoke writing-plans skill" [label="approved"];
}

**The terminal state is invoking writing-plans.** Do NOT invoke frontend-design, mcp-builder, or any other implementation skill. The ONLY skill you invoke after brainstorming is writing-plans.

The Process

**Understanding the idea:**

• Check out the current project state first (files, docs, recent commits)
• Before asking detailed questions, assess scope: if the request describes multiple independent subsystems (e.g., "build a platform with chat, file storage, billing, and analytics"), flag this immediately. Don't spend questions refining details of a project that needs to be decomposed first.
• If the project is too large for a single spec, help the user decompose into sub-projects: what are the independent pieces, how do they relate, what order should they be built? Then brainstorm the first sub-project through the normal design flow. Each sub-project gets its own spec → plan → implementation cycle.
• For appropriately-scoped projects, 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

**CTO-level thinking — apply to every design:**

Before presenting the design, think through these dimensions (include relevant ones in the design doc):

• **Scale**: Will this approach work at 10x the current load? At 100x? Where does it break? You don't need to build for 100x now, but you need to know the ceiling.
• **Data model**: Is the schema normalized appropriately? Are the most common queries indexed? Will this model accommodate the next 3 likely features without a migration?
• **Failure modes**: What happens when the database is s