brainstorming

Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs

Overview

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.

Escalate to a design-and-approval cycle before implementing when the work is **irreversible or destructive** — its harm escapes a `git` rollback (data / schema migrations, deleting or overwriting data or history, a published / public contract, external side effects like payments or emails, security / auth / secrets) — OR it is **obviously large / multi-subsystem**, OR the **user asked to design** (see using-superpowers → Right-Sizing Process). When escalating, do NOT invoke any implementation skill, write code, scaffold, or take implementation action until you have presented a design and the user has approved it.

Otherwise — reversible, not-obviously-large work — do NOT gate: state a one-line intent, implement directly under the discipline (test-driven-development, systematic-debugging, verification-before-completion), and arm the spike-checkpoint so a mis-size is recoverable. In autonomous/headless runs with no user to approve, never stall.

Anti-Pattern: Mis-Sizing The Ceremony

Size by reversibility and blast radius, not line count. Two failure modes:

• Over-ceremony: gating reversible work you could've just done — a one-line helper, a rename, a self-contained function. If a wrong call is recoverable (the spike-checkpoint has your back), don't pay for a design-and-approval cycle up front.
• Under-protection: treating an irreversible action as routine because the code looks small. A three-line schema migration is not "Quick" — you can't un-migrate. If the harm escapes a git rollback, design first, however short the diff.

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) — 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/superpowers/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md and commit
7. Spec self-review — quick inline check for placeholders, consistency, scope, ambiguity, YAGNI (see below)
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 self-review\n(fix inline)" [shape=box];
    "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 self-review\n(fix inline)";
    "Spec self-review\n(fix inline)" -> "User reviews spec?";
    "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 any domain-specific implementation skill (e.g., UI builders, scaffolding tools). 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.
• 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

Presenting the design:

• Once you believe you understand what you're building, present the design
• Scale each section to its complexity: a few sentences if straightforward, up to 200-300 words if nuanced
• Ask after each section whether it looks right so far
• Cover: architecture, components, data flow, error handling, testing
• Be ready to go back and clarify if something doesn't make sense

Design for isolation and clarity:

• Break the system into smaller units that each have one clear purpose, communicate through well-defined interfaces, and can be understood and tested independently.
• For each unit, you should be able to answer: what does it do, how do you use it, and what does it depend on?
• Can someone understand what a unit does without reading its internals? Can you change the internals without breaking consumers? If not, the boundaries need work.
• Smaller, well-bounded units are also easier for you to work with — you reason better about code you can hold in context at once, and your edits are more reliable when files are focused. When a file grows large, that's often a signal that it's doing too much.

Working in existing codebases:

• Explore the current structure before proposing changes. Follow existing patterns.
• Where existing code has problems that affect the work (e.g., a file that's grown too large, unclear boundaries, tangled responsibilities), include targeted improvements as part of the design — the way a good developer improves code they're working in.
• Don't propose unrelated refactoring. Stay focused on what serves the current goal.

After the Design

Documentation:

• Write the validated design to docs/superpowers/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md
• Use elements-of-style:writing-clearly-and-concisely skill if available
• Commit the design document to git

Spec Self-Review: After writing the spec document, look at it with fresh eyes. Calibration: only flag issues that would cause real problems during implementation planning — stylistic preferences, minor wording, and "this section could be longer" don't count. Fix or skip them silently.

1. Placeholder scan: Any "TBD", "TODO", incomplete sections, or vague requirements? Fix them.
2. Internal consistency: Do any sections contradict each other? Does the architecture match the feature descriptions?
3. Scope check: Is this focused enough for a single implementation plan, or does it need decomposition?
4. Ambiguity check: Could any requirement be interpreted two different ways? If so, pick one and make it explicit.
5. YAGNI check: Any unrequested features, premature abstractions, or over-engineering? Cut them.

Fix any real issues inline. No need to re-review — just fix and move on.

User Review Gate: After the spec self-review, ask the user to review the written spec file before proceeding to writing-plans. The user may have caught something the design conversation missed once they see it on paper.

Implementation:

• Once the user approves the spec, invoke the writing-plans skill to create a detailed implementation plan
• Do NOT invoke any other skill. writing-plans is the next step.

Key Principles

• One question at a time - Don't overwhelm with multiple questions
• Multiple choice preferred - Easier to answer than open-ended when possible
• YAGNI ruthlessly - Remove unnecessary features from all designs
• Explore alternatives - Always propose 2-3 approaches before settling
• Incremental validation - Present design, get approval before moving on
• Be flexible - Go back and clarify when something doesn't make sense

Visual Companion

A browser-based companion for showing mockups, diagrams, and visual options during brainstorming. It's a tool, not a mode — accepting the companion means it's available for questions that benefit from visual treatment, not that every question goes through the browser.

Offering the companion: When upcoming questions are likely to involve visual content (mockups, layouts, diagrams), offer it once for consent:

"Some of what we're working on might be easier to explain if I can show it to you in a web browser. I can put together mockups, diagrams, comparisons, and other visuals as we go. This feature is still new and can be token-intensive. Want to try it? (Requires opening a local URL)"

Make this offer its own message. No clarifying questions, no context summary, no other content alongside it — just the offer, then wait for the user's response. If they decline, continue with text-only brainstorming.

Per-question decision: Even after the user accepts, decide for each question whether to use the browser or the terminal. The test: would the user understand this better by seeing it than reading it?

• Use the browser for content that is visual — mockups, wireframes, layout comparisons, architecture diagrams, side-by-side visual designs
• Use the terminal for content that is text — requirements questions, conceptual choices, tradeoff lists, A/B/C/D text options, scope decisions

A question about a UI topic isn't automatically a visual question. "What does personality mean in this context?" is conceptual — use the terminal. "Which wizard layout works better?" is visual — use the browser.

If the user agrees to the companion, read the full guide before proceeding: skills/brainstorming/visual-companion.md

Integration

Invoked by: User directly (entry point for creative work)

Hands off to:

• h-superpowers:writing-plans - Creates implementation plan from the approved design

Optional companion:

• Visual companion (this skill directory) — browser-based mockup/diagram tool for visual questions. See visual-companion.md.