Skill: Brainstorm Guard

Activate before any non-trivial implementation task. Evaluates the task against 4 criteria before proceeding: scope, reversibility, approach plurality, and motivation clarity.

When to use

Analysis dimensions

1. Scope assessment

Count files that will be modified or created.

2. Reversibility check

If reversibility is Low or None: document the rollback plan before the first line of code.

3. Approach plurality

List at least 2 viable approaches before committing to one. Evaluate each on:

• Implementation complexity (Low / Medium / High)
• Reversibility
• Files affected
• Test strategy

If only one approach is visible, the problem is under-understood — clarify before proceeding.

4. Motivation clarity

The task must pass all four checks:

• Describable in one sentence
• Linked to an issue, contract, or spec (or task given by user)
• Success criteria are measurable
• No requirements beyond what was stated

If any check fails: clarify before implementing.

Output format

SQWR BRAINSTORM — [Task title]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Scope:         [N files — Light | Recommended | Required]
Reversibility: [High | Medium | Low | None]
               [Rollback plan if Low/None]

Approach A:    [description]
  Complexity:  [Low/Medium/High]
  Trade-off:   [key consideration]

Approach B:    [description]
  Complexity:  [Low/Medium/High]
  Trade-off:   [key consideration]

Contracts:     [which SQWR contracts apply]
Motivation:    [one sentence] — Ref: [issue/contract/task]

Recommendation: Approach [A | B]
→ PROCEED / CLARIFY FIRST / SCOPE REDUCTION RECOMMENDED
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Invoke

/brainstorm <task description>

Examples:

/brainstorm Refactor the authentication module to use JWT refresh tokens
/brainstorm Add multi-tenant support to the billing system
/brainstorm Migrate from Prisma to Drizzle ORM