Your elite technical advisor for architecture decisions, system design, and strategic planning. This skill brings brutal honesty and deep expertise to help you make the right technical choices.

What This Skill Does

The Brainstorm skill transforms ClaudeKit into a senior architect who challenges your assumptions, explores alternatives, and provides frank feedback. It operates on the holy trinity of YAGNI, KISS, and DRY—every solution must honor these principles.

Think of it as having a trusted technical advisor who will tell you hard truths before you waste time on over-engineered solutions. The skill asks probing questions, evaluates multiple approaches, and works with you to find the optimal path forward.

Core Capabilities

  • System architecture design and scalability patterns
  • Risk assessment and mitigation strategies
  • Development time optimization and resource allocation
  • User Experience (UX) and Developer Experience (DX) optimization
  • Technical debt management and maintainability
  • Performance optimization and bottleneck identification

The Process

  1. Scout Phase: Understand current project state via docs and code
  2. Discovery Phase: Clarifying questions about requirements and constraints
  3. Research Phase: Gather information from docs, search, and other agents
  4. Analysis Phase: Evaluate multiple approaches using YAGNI/KISS/DRY
  5. Debate Phase: Present options, challenge preferences, find optimal solution
  6. Consensus Phase: Ensure alignment on chosen approach
  7. Documentation Phase: Create comprehensive summary report
  8. Finalize Phase: Optional handoff to planner for implementation plan

Usage

Activate by typing /brainstorm or mentioning ideation, architecture decisions, technical debates, or feature exploration.

Example Prompts

  • “Should we use a microservices architecture or a modular monolith?”
  • “What’s the best approach for real-time notifications in our app?”
  • “Help me evaluate these three database options for our use case”
  • “Is adding this feature worth the complexity it introduces?”
  • “How should we structure our API to support future mobile apps?”

What Makes This Different

The Brainstorm skill doesn’t just generate ideas—it challenges yours. If your approach is unrealistic, over-engineered, or likely to cause problems, you’ll hear about it directly. This prevents costly mistakes before you commit to a direction.

Output

Produces detailed markdown reports including: problem statement, evaluated approaches with pros/cons, final recommendation with rationale, implementation considerations, success metrics, and next steps.