brainstorming

Use before creative or constructive work (features, architecture, behavior). Transforms vague ideas into validated designs through disciplined reasoning and collaboration.

Quality

54%

Does it follow best practices?

Run evals on this skill

Adds up to 20 points to the overall score

View guide

Securityby

Passed

No findings from the security scan

Fix and improve this skill with Tessl

tessl review fix ./skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md

The canonical home for this skill is brainstorming in sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills

Quality

Content

77%Scale 1-3

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

This is a well-crafted process skill with excellent workflow clarity and actionability—the hard gates, incremental validation, and explicit confirmation prompts make it highly effective as a design facilitation guide. Its main weaknesses are moderate verbosity (some redundant emphasis and boilerplate) and a monolithic structure that could benefit from splitting templates or detailed sections into referenced files. Overall, it's a strong instruction-only skill that clearly guides Claude through a disciplined design process.

Suggestions

Trim redundant emphasis phrases like 'This is still not final design' and 'Do not design yet' where the workflow structure already makes sequencing clear.

Extract the Decision Log format and Documentation template into a separate reference file (e.g., TEMPLATES.md) to improve progressive disclosure and reduce main file length.

Remove or significantly condense the generic 'When to Use' and 'Limitations' boilerplate sections at the end, which add little skill-specific value.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Conciseness	The skill is reasonably structured but includes some unnecessary verbosity—repeated emphasis on constraints Claude could infer (e.g., 'You are not allowed to implement'), redundant phrasing like 'This is still not final design,' and the boilerplate 'When to Use' and 'Limitations' sections at the end add little value. Some tightening would improve token efficiency.	2 / 3
Actionability	The skill provides highly concrete, step-by-step guidance with specific deliverables at each stage (e.g., '5-7 bullet summary,' exact confirmation prompts to use, decision log format). While there's no code (appropriate for an instruction-only skill), every step is specific and directly executable as a conversational workflow.	3 / 3
Workflow Clarity	The multi-step process is clearly sequenced with numbered phases, explicit hard gates (Understanding Lock, Exit Criteria), validation checkpoints after each design section, and a feedback loop ('confirm or correct anything before we move to design'). The exit criteria serve as a comprehensive checklist preventing premature progression.	3 / 3
Progressive Disclosure	The content is well-organized with clear headers and logical sections, but it's entirely monolithic—everything lives in one file with no references to supporting documents. The reference to 'multi-agent-brainstorming' skill is mentioned but not linked. For a skill of this length (~200 lines), splitting the decision log template or documentation format into a separate reference file would improve organization.	2 / 3
	Total	10 / 12 Passed

Description

32%Scale 1-3

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

This description relies heavily on abstract language and buzzwords ('disciplined reasoning', 'validated designs', 'collaboration') without specifying concrete actions the skill performs. While it attempts a 'Use when' clause, the triggers are too broad to distinguish this skill from many others. The description would benefit greatly from listing specific deliverables and narrowing its scope.

Suggestions

Replace abstract language with concrete actions, e.g., 'Creates design documents, writes technical specs, defines API contracts, outlines system architecture' instead of 'Transforms vague ideas into validated designs'.

Narrow the trigger terms to specific, distinguishable scenarios, e.g., 'Use when the user asks for a design doc, technical spec, RFC, architecture proposal, or feature plan' instead of the overly broad 'creative or constructive work'.

Clarify what 'disciplined reasoning and collaboration' means in practice—does it ask clarifying questions, produce structured documents, run through a checklist? Specify the actual mechanism.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Specificity	The description uses vague, abstract language like 'creative or constructive work', 'vague ideas', and 'validated designs'. It does not list any concrete actions—'transforms' and 'disciplined reasoning and collaboration' are buzzwords rather than specific capabilities.	1 / 3
Completeness	It has a 'when' clause ('Use before creative or constructive work') and a vague 'what' ('Transforms vague ideas into validated designs'), but the 'what' is too abstract to be useful and the 'when' triggers are overly broad. The 'Use when' equivalent is present but weak.	2 / 3
Trigger Term Quality	It includes some relevant terms like 'features', 'architecture', and 'behavior' that users might mention, but these are very broad and could apply to many domains. Missing natural user phrases like 'design doc', 'spec', 'RFC', 'plan', 'proposal', etc.	2 / 3
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk	Terms like 'features', 'architecture', 'creative or constructive work', and 'validated designs' are extremely broad and would overlap with many skills—architecture skills, planning skills, feature development skills, design skills, etc.	1 / 3
	Total	6 / 12 Passed

Validation

90%

Warnings & errors only

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

Validation — 10 / 11 Passed

Validation for skill structure

Criteria	Description	Result
frontmatter_unknown_keys	Unknown frontmatter key(s) found; consider removing or moving to metadata	Warning

	Total	10 / 11 Passed

Repository: popey/claude-code-skills
Path: skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md
Commit: a5a6601

Reviewed: 18 hours ago

Table of Contents

Discovery Implementation Validation

Is this your skill?

If you maintain this skill, you can claim it as your own. Once claimed, you can manage eval scenarios, bundle related skills, attach documentation or rules, and ensure cross-agent compatibility.