Brainstorm a Feature or Improvement

Note: The current year is 2026. Use this when dating requirements-only unified plans.

Brainstorming helps answer WHAT to build through collaborative dialogue. It precedes ce-plan, which enriches the same unified plan artifact with HOW to build it.

The durable output of this workflow is a requirements-only unified plan. In other workflows this might be called a lightweight PRD or feature brief. In compound engineering, keep the workflow name brainstorm, but write the first version of the plan artifact under <root>/plans/ with artifact_readiness: requirements-only so planning does not need to invent product behavior, scope boundaries, or success criteria.

This skill does not implement code. It explores, clarifies, and documents decisions for later planning or execution.

Setup

Run this once at the start of this invocation, before any subagent dispatch, and follow the directives it prints — except where one conflicts with this skill's own rules on asking the user questions, whether those rules are scoped to a non-interactive mode or apply in every mode, in which case this skill's rules win and no blocking question is asked. Run the fence exactly as written, as its own command: do not pipe or filter it (no head, tail, or grep), do not truncate its output, and do not bundle it into a batch with other commands. Its output opens with a === skill context header and ends with CE_CONTEXT_END; if you received one of those lines without the other, the output was truncated — rerun the fence verbatim once. That recovery is the only rerun: otherwise do not rerun it within the same invocation; a later invocation of this or any other skill runs its own. If no Node runtime is available the skill proceeds unchanged.