brainstorming

Invoke the brainstorming process before any coding: the agent explores your project context, asks clarifying questions one at a time, proposes 2-3 approaches with trade-offs, and writes the approved design to docs/plans as a dated markdown file.

Requirements and design should be validated first. This Skill enforces a hard gate: no implementation skill, code, or scaffolding is allowed until a design has been presented section by section and explicitly approved by the user.

Yes, every project goes through the process regardless of perceived simplicity, including single-function utilities and config changes. The design can be short for simple work, but it must still be presented and approved.

The validated design is saved to docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md and committed to git. The only permitted next step is the writing-plans skill, which creates the implementation plan; other implementation skills are explicitly excluded.

The Skill itself mandates use before any creative work, so it is not suited for purely mechanical tasks with no design decisions, such as running existing scripts or applying already-approved plans. Those belong to implementation-phase skills.