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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.

1.17x
Quality

73%

Does it follow best practices?

Impact

74%

1.17x

Average score across 3 eval scenarios

SecuritybySnyk

Low

Low-risk findings worth noting

Fix and improve this skill with Tessl

tessl review fix ./src-tauri/experts/skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md

The canonical home for this skill is brainstorming in obra/superpowers

SKILL.md
Quality
Evals
Security

Quality

Content

70%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

The body is an exceptionally clear, gate-driven workflow with verbatim scripts and strong feedback loops — top marks for actionability and workflow clarity. It is dragged down by systemic redundancy (the workflow restated four ways plus generic design-principle padding) and by a progressive-disclosure failure: the referenced visual-companion.md is missing from the bundle and the scripts/ files are unreferenced.

Suggestions

Collapse the workflow to a single representation: keep the ordered Checklist and cut the dot digraph and 'Key Principles' recap, which restate it verbatim — roughly 35 lines saved with no information loss.

Trim or remove 'Design for isolation and clarity' and 'Working in existing codebases' down to one-line pointers; modularity and 'follow existing patterns' are knowledge Claude already has.

Fix the dangling `skills/brainstorming/visual-companion.md` reference (ship the file or inline its essentials) and add a short 'Visual companion tooling' section pointing at the actual `scripts/` files (start-server.sh / stop-server.sh) so the bundled infrastructure is discoverable.

DimensionReasoningScore

Conciseness

The same 9-step workflow is presented four times — the Checklist, the 29-line dot digraph, the 'The Process'/'After the Design' prose, and the 'Key Principles' recap — and 'Design for isolation and clarity' lectures on concepts Claude already knows ('Smaller, well-bounded units are also easier for you to work with - you reason better about code you can hold in context at once'). That is several padded/generic sections, matching anchor 2; it avoids anchor 1 because the core dialogue guidance (offer scripts, gates, review checks) is skill-specific and not background explanation, and doesn't reach anchor 3 because the redundancy is systemic rather than a few stray sentences.

2 / 5

Actionability

Guidance is copy-paste ready throughout: the verbatim Visual Companion offer ("Some of what we're working on might be easier to explain if I can show it to you in a web browser..."), the verbatim spec-review message ("Spec written and committed to `<path>`..."), the exact spec path pattern `docs/superpowers/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md`, and the four named self-review checks. Per the rubric's instruction-skill note, absence of code isn't penalized when guidance is this concrete; it exceeds anchor 4 because the specific examples cover the common cases (accept/decline companion, approved/changes-requested spec review).

5 / 5

Workflow Clarity

The 9-step checklist is strictly ordered with a HARD-GATE up front, explicit validation checkpoints (user approval after each design section, spec self-review, a dedicated User Review Gate), and explicit feedback loops ("User approves design?" -> 'no, revise'; "User reviews spec?" -> 'changes requested' loops back). This matches anchor 5 ('clear sequence with explicit validation steps; feedback loops for error recovery; checklists for complex processes'); no destructive or batch operations are involved, so no cap applies.

5 / 5

Progressive Disclosure

The body is well-sectioned and its one reference is clearly signaled ("read the detailed guide before proceeding: `skills/brainstorming/visual-companion.md`"), but scored against the actual bundle that path is dangling — no visual-companion.md exists anywhere in the skill — and the five real files in `scripts/` (server.cjs, start-server.sh, stop-server.sh, helper.js, frame-template.html) are never referenced from SKILL.md, leaving the bundle's infrastructure undiscoverable. This sits between anchor 3 (structure present but organization flawed) and anchor 4 (minor gaps only); a broken primary reference plus orphaned bundle files is more than a minor gap, so 3.

3 / 5

Total

15

/

20

Passed

Description

62%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

The description does a solid job on the what/when structure, with explicit trigger guidance and natural user phrasing. Its main weakness is over-claiming: asserting itself as a mandatory pre-step for all creative work makes it collide with nearly every other development skill, and the capability list undersells what the skill actually does.

Suggestions

Narrow the trigger surface to concrete user moments (e.g., 'Use when the user asks to build, design, or plan a new feature, component, or project') so it doesn't claim precedence over every code change.

Expand the 'what' to name the full deliverable set — proposing 2-3 approaches with trade-offs, presenting a design for approval, and writing a committed spec document — not just 'explores intent, requirements and design'.

Add the natural synonyms users say ('brainstorm', 'design', 'spec', 'new project') to improve trigger recall.

DimensionReasoningScore

Specificity

The 'what' is a single clause — "Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation" — naming the domain and 1-2 concrete actions, but never mentions the other things the skill actually does (propose approaches, present designs, write spec docs). This matches anchor 3 ('Names domain and 1-2 concrete actions, but not comprehensive'); it is below anchor 4 because the remaining phrases ('creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior') are triggers, not capability descriptions, and above anchor 2 because the actions given are concrete rather than generic.

3 / 5

Completeness

Both halves are explicit: the 'what' ("Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation") and an explicit trigger clause ("You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior"), so the 'missing Use when... cap at 3' rule does not apply. Below anchor 5 because the 'when' is a broad mandate rather than concrete user-utterance triggers ('Use when the user asks to build or design X').

4 / 5

Trigger Term Quality

Phrases like "creating features", "building components", "adding functionality", and "modifying behavior" are natural things users say when starting creative work, giving good keyword coverage. Not anchor 5 because common variations users actually utter — 'brainstorm', 'design a', 'new project', 'spec', 'plan' — are absent.

4 / 5

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

The trigger claims "before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior", which covers essentially every software development task, creating high overlap risk with implementation, planning, and refactoring skills — matching anchor 2 ('Very broad; high overlap risk with many similar skills'). Not anchor 3 because the claimed trigger surface, not just the niche, is what a router would match on, and 'modifying behavior' alone collides with most change-oriented skills.

2 / 5

Total

13

/

20

Passed

Validation

100%

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 16 / 16 Passed

Validation for skill structure

No warnings or errors.

Repository

arwei944/codeg

Path

src-tauri/experts/skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md

Reviewed

Table of Contents

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