brainstorming
Forces requirements exploration before any creative work: intent, constraints, and design alternatives surfaced and agreed before implementation starts.
Anatomy
| Parent repo | obra/superpowers |
|---|---|
| Path | skills/brainstorming |
| Trigger conditions | "You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality" |
| Instruction format | yaml-frontmatter-md |
| Required tools | |
| Reusability | universal |
| Complexity | low |
| Ships scripts / examples / tests / boundaries | no / yes / no / yes |
Failure modes
Adds a questioning phase to tasks whose requirements were already precise; operators under time pressure learn to bypass it, which silently removes the protection.
Verdict
The upstream twin of verification: one attacks wrong output, this attacks wrong goals. Its mandatory phrasing is aggressive by design and is the reason it actually fires.
Related skills
Blocks the agent from claiming work is complete, fixed, or passing until it has run verification commands and confirmed output. Evidence…
Forces root-cause investigation before any fix: reproduce, hypothesize one cause at a time, test the hypothesis, then patch. Bans…
Frequently asked questions
What does the brainstorming skill do?
Forces requirements exploration before any creative work: intent, constraints, and design alternatives surfaced and agreed before implementation starts.
When does brainstorming trigger?
Its stated trigger: "You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality". Trigger precision is a scored reliability dimension.