Brainstorming Design Guide

Problem It Solves

Many features start moving into code before intent, constraints, and success criteria are shared. This skill treats brainstorming as a design-review gate: before implementation, behavior changes, or speculative work, it clarifies purpose, users, constraints, non-goals, and assumptions, reducing premature builds, misaligned solutions, and fragile systems. It is not a generic ideation tool; it is a pre-implementation alignment workflow for engineering tasks.

How It Works

When activated, the model acts as a design guide and reviewer, not a builder. The process includes:

• inspecting project context and separating existing facts from proposed changes;
• asking one question at a time, preferably as multiple choice;
• making non-functional expectations explicit for performance, scale, security and privacy, reliability, and maintenance ownership;
• producing an understanding summary, assumptions, and open questions, then waiting for explicit confirmation;
• proposing 2–3 options with tradeoffs in complexity, extensibility, risk, and maintainability, while applying YAGNI;
• presenting design in 200–300-word sections and maintaining a decision log.

Boundaries

This skill fits high-risk, assumption-heavy, cross-module, or documentation-sensitive design work. It is not a shortcut for rapid prototyping; for “just build it” requests, the process can feel heavyweight. The source material notes that major or high-risk designs should hand off the final design and decision log to multi-agent-brainstorming instead of moving straight into implementation.