Brainstorming

brainstorming is the front gate to creative work: features, components, behaviors. Before any code or scaffold, the skill explores user intent, constraints, and success criteria — one question at a time — then proposes 2-3 approaches with tradeoffs and a recommendation. The design is presented in sections sized to its complexity; the user approves each section before the next one is drafted. The HARD-GATE is the principle that defines the skill: no implementation skill, no code, no project scaffold may be invoked until a written design exists and the user has approved it. The exception list is empty — even a one-line config change goes through the process, because that's where unexamined assumptions cause the most wasted work. After approval the design is committed to `docs/superpowers/specs/<topic>-design.md`. A self-review pass catches placeholders, contradictions, and ambiguous requirements. The user reviews the written spec, then brainstorming hands off to the writing-plans skill — never to frontend-design or mcp-builder or any other downstream skill. A Visual Companion mode is available when a question is genuinely better seen than described, but visual UI topics are not automatically visual questions.