brainstorming

name	brainstorming
description	Use when creative product, feature, UI, or behavior work needs intent, requirements, constraints, or design explored before implementation.

Brainstorming

Purpose

Turn a rough idea into a clear business direction before writing a BRD, PRD, FSD, or code.

Announce: "I'm using the brainstorming skill to explore and refine this idea."

When To Use

Use when acceptance criteria, product direction, users, constraints, tradeoffs, UI/workflow shape, or the choice among plausible approaches is unclear. Skip when the user already supplied a concrete specification, exact files, and acceptance criteria; route that work to /sc-plan.

Advisory Read-only Mode

When a read-only caller such as /sc-geniusloop, review, or audit uses this skill as an analysis lens, inspect context and compare options but do not write or create a brainstorm artifact. Skip the capture mutation and return proposed decisions, uncertainties, and the owning workflow to the caller.

Reference Router

• Inspect nearby implementation, prior ideas, learned solutions, and UI retrieval before questioning: local context
• Narrow intent and compare candidate directions: questions and options
• Save the chosen direction and open questions: capture
• Explore UI, responsive/accessibility needs, flows, states, and useful diagrams: UI and visual exploration
• Counter premature coding or scope retention and choose the next workflow: red flags and next steps

Load local context first, questions/options while deciding, and capture only once decisions are useful enough to persist.

Mandatory Gates

• Context-before-questions gate: Inspect easy-to-find similar code/docs, recent docs/brainstorms/, docs/solutions/, learned knowledge, and relevant interface-design search results before asking what the repository can already answer.
• Question gate: Ask one concise question per turn. Start with user/job/outcome, then success, constraints, non-goals, existing patterns, risk, edge cases, and reversibility. Prefer lettered choices when natural.
• Options gate: Offer 2-3 approaches with description, pros, cons, and fit. Lead with a recommendation; prefer the simplest option that meets the goal while preserving future change.
• UI gate: Ground interface exploration in interface-design, concrete decisions, accessibility, responsiveness, and existing components. Use diagrams only when they clarify architecture, flows, states, data, or ownership.
• Capture gate: Outside advisory read-only mode, save useful decisions to docs/brainstorms/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-brainstorm.md with purpose, rationale, alternatives, decisions, open questions, and recommended next workflow. Name non-goals explicitly.
• Plan gate: Brainstorming does not authorize implementation. Route to /sc-prd after a BRD, /sc-plan after PRD approval, /sc-ui for interface work, or /sc-work only when requirements are already concrete and approved.

Related Skills

Use prd-generator, writing-plans, interface-design, and knowledge-compounding for requirements, FSD goals, frontend grounding, and reusable lessons.