gaia-brainstorming

name	gaia-brainstorming
description	Facilitated brainstorming session using diverse creative techniques. Use when the user wants to run a structured ideation session (mind mapping, SCAMPER, six thinking hats, etc.) with ranked output.
argument-hint	[brainstorming topic]
allowed-tools	["Read","Write","Glob"]
orchestration_class	conversational

Orchestration Mode

SESSION_MODE=$(bash "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/detect-orchestration-mode.sh")
WARNING_OUTPUT=$(bash "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/orchestration-warning.sh" --skill-class conversational --mode "$SESSION_MODE")
if printf '%s' "$WARNING_OUTPUT" | grep -q '^SURFACE-WARNING: '; then
  SENTINEL_PATH=$(printf '%s' "$WARNING_OUTPUT" | sed -n 's/^SURFACE-WARNING: //p' | head -n1)
  cat "$SENTINEL_PATH"
fi

Surface contract. When the prelude cats a sentinel file — which happens once per session under Mode A (subagent dispatch) — you MUST mirror that cat'd warning text VERBATIM as the FIRST user-visible text of your response, before any skill-phase output. Claude Code auto-collapses Bash tool-call output, so the warning is invisible to users unless re-emitted as LLM turn text. Skip this step only when the prelude produced no sentinel output (Mode B, repeat invocation in same session, or out-of-scope skill class).

gaia-brainstorming

Facilitated creative ideation session: Session Setup → Technique Selection → Technique Execution → Idea Organization. Produces a ranked, categorized artifact at .gaia/artifacts/creative-artifacts/brainstorming-{date}.md. Converted with full parity against _gaia/core/workflows/brainstorming/.

Critical Rules

• Run the four phases in order — never skip Session Setup or Idea Organization.
• Delegate facilitation to Rex (brainstorming-coach) via the Agent tool when plugins/gaia/agents/brainstorming-coach.md is available. If the subagent is unavailable or not registered, facilitate inline — do not halt.
• Preserve the output path exactly: .gaia/artifacts/creative-artifacts/brainstorming-{date}.md (date as YYYY-MM-DD). Downstream skills glob on this prefix.
• Use brainstorming-template.md for the output structure.
• During execution: quantity over quality — capture every idea without filtering.

Session Setup

Ask these five questions in order:

1. Topic — what the user wants to brainstorm about.
2. Scope — broad exploration or a focused problem.
3. Constraints — time, budget, technical, team size.
4. Output format — list, ranked, categorized, action plan.
5. Session tone — wild ideas welcome vs. practical solutions only.

Technique Selection

Recommend 2–3 techniques from the table below with a one-line rationale each, let the user choose, then explain how the selected technique works.

Technique	Best For	Description
Mind Mapping	Exploring a broad topic	Start with a central concept, branch out
SCAMPER	Improving existing ideas	Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other use, Eliminate, Reverse
Reverse Brainstorming	Finding hidden problems	"How could we make this fail?" then invert
Six Thinking Hats	Balanced perspective	Examine from 6 angles: facts, emotions, caution, benefits, creativity, process
Brainwriting	Rapid idea generation	Generate ideas silently, build on others
Worst Possible Idea	Breaking creative blocks	Start with terrible ideas, find the good in them
SWOT	Strategic analysis	Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
How Might We	Reframing problems	Convert problems into opportunity statements

Technique Execution

Run the selected technique round by round:

1. Generate 5–10 ideas per round using the technique's methodology.
2. Present the ideas to the user and build on their reactions.
3. Capture every idea — no filtering.
4. Run multiple selected techniques sequentially.
5. Target 15–30 total ideas before moving to organization.

Idea Organization

1. Group ideas into 3–5 thematic categories.
2. Rank each by Impact (High/Med/Low) and Feasibility (High/Med/Low) and a combined score.
3. Identify the top 3–5 ideas overall. For each: one-sentence summary, why it's valuable, first concrete next step.
4. Render the artifact from brainstorming-template.md and write it to .gaia/artifacts/creative-artifacts/brainstorming-{date}.md.

After artifact write: run open-question detection snippet !${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/detect-open-questions.sh .gaia/artifacts/creative-artifacts/brainstorming-${DATE}.md

5. Report the output path and suggest /gaia-market-research, /gaia-domain-research, or /gaia-tech-research as follow-ups.

Mode B Readiness

Driving teammate turns (MANDATORY under team orchestration). Declaring readiness above sets up the spawn / relay / shutdown bookkeeping seams — it does NOT by itself drive a teammate. When SESSION_MODE == team, the orchestrator MUST drive each teammate turn per the canonical Mode B teammate round-trip contract at knowledge/mode-b-round-trip-contract.md: emit a real SendMessage(to: <handle>) whose message ends with the reply-routing reminder, let the teammate reply via SendMessage(to: team-lead) (one-shot re-prompt on idle-without-reply; never fabricate the reply), then relay the received body to the transcript / artifact. The bridge functions named above are bookkeeping only; the round-trip itself is an orchestrator-driven, main-turn loop.

No discretionary Mode A fall-through. The team-mode round-trip is mandatory when the session resolves to team orchestration — "it is a small / focused / quick step" is NOT a license to fall back to one-shot Mode A, and a slow reply is the cross-turn-boundary case (wait or re-prompt once), not a fallback trigger. The ONLY legitimate fall-through is a real MODE_B_FALLBACK token emitted by the bridge at spawn time (substrate genuinely unavailable).

This conversational skill is Mode B-ready. Under Mode B (opt-in: persistent teammates), participant dispatch routes through the shared dispatch library at scripts/lib/dispatch-teammate.sh via the conversational bridge at scripts/lib/conversational-mode-b-bridge.sh. Each participant is spawned with conversational_spawn_participant, which obtains a long-lived teammate handle, enforces the reviewer clean-room invariant, and logs dispatch provenance. Turn output is relayed verbatim to the session transcript, so the artifact structure (transcript and synthesis) is byte-for-byte the same as Mode A.

When the Mode B substrate is absent — the default in this build — the shared library degrades to Mode A foreground dispatch and emits a single machine-parseable MODE_B_FALLBACK token to stderr. Existing Mode A behavior is preserved unchanged; Mode B is attempted only when the substrate is live.

Shutdown discipline. Every spawned participant MUST be cleaned up at skill completion. Wire trap conversational_shutdown EXIT around the participant loop; conversational_shutdown delegates to shutdown_all in the shared library, which sweeps every active teammate and leaves no orphaned session.