Agent skill · creative production · obra
brainstorming
You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a structured brainstorming process that helps clarify user intent and design requirements before implementation, which the AI may not reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 9k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 268,212 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Brainstorming Ideas Into Designs Help turn ideas into fully formed designs and specs through natural collaborative dialogue. Start by classifying how much process the request needs, then work through your path: understand the context, refine the idea, present a design, and get your human partner's approval. <HARD-GATE> Do NOT invoke any implementation skill, write any code, scaffold any project, or take any implementation action until you have told your human partner what you intend and they have approved it. This applies to EVERY task on EVERY path below — the ceremony scales with the task; the approval gate never does. </HARD-GATE> Three Paths Before your first question, classify the request and say the classification out loud — "this looks bounded, so I'll present a short design here rather than write a spec" — so your human partner can override it: Spike — a feasibility question ("can we...", "is it possible...", "quick and dirty is fine") whose output is an answer, not code you keep. Present the question and what you'll try in 2-3 sentences, get a nod, then find out as cheaply as correctness allows. No design doc, no spec file. Report findings as a recommendation; anything you built stays labeled throwaway. Bounded — a well-scoped change to code that already exists in this repo: a new flag, a small endpoint, a one-file fix. Understanding the kind of app is not enough — bounded means the flow you are changing is already here to read. If there is no existing flow to change, the task is not bounded. Ask the clarifying questions that matter, present a short design IN CHAT (a few sentences to a few short paragraphs), and STOP. Implementation starts only after your human partner says yes to that design — a bounded task's approval is as hard a gate as an architectural one. No spec file, no implementation plan document. Architectural — new projects, new subsystems, changes that restructure how components fit together or alter interfaces others depend on. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills obra/brainstorming