Every Time He Has an Idea, He Throws It to Claude Code for a Review First

Daniel San has a habit. Whenever an idea pops into his head, he doesn't rush to open the editor; he first throws it into Claude Code and lets a skill called Brainstorming take over.

What this skill does isn't complicated: it asks him questions round after round, explores different approaches, lays out the pros and cons for discussion, and then comes back to refine the idea. Requirements become clearer through the conversation, the design is broken into several parts, each part goes through verification, and finally it turns into a plan document. By this point, not a single line of code has been written, but he already knows exactly what he wants to do.

Installation:

npx claude-code-templates@latest --skill development/brainstorming

The project is at aitmpl.com. It's part of Claude Code Templates, has 30.8k stars on GitHub, is under the MIT license, and is free. Besides skills, there are also agents, commands, hooks, MCP configurations, settings, and other components that can be installed separately. All components are plain-text files, so you can read the source code before installing them.

One reply under this tweet put it very plainly: brainstorming before writing code—I've skipped that step for far too long. Someone else's version was even harsher: half of my bugs are actually the answers to questions no one ever asked.

Someone else poured cold water on it. A commenter pointed out that classic brainstorming (Alex Osborn's rules) requires a divergent phase first: no judgment, no criticism, no evaluation; produce as many ideas as possible, including wild ones, and only then move into convergence. This skill starts asking questions and verifying right away, which may skip that step. This criticism holds up and is worth noting.

Another developer mentioned a detail: for brainstorming, speaking works better than typing. As you talk, it helps poke holes in your thinking; when you hit something abstract, you just say, 'I need a diagram,' and it draws one for you. Typing kills half of the ideas before they've even taken shape.

When it comes to 'asking the question clearly,' one comment was pretty interesting: AI asking 'What exactly do you mean by better?' is the best cure for product managers.

Tools won't think for you; they'll only ask you questions. But what many projects lack is exactly the person sitting across from you asking, 'What do you actually want?'