ideate

An ideation command that asks structured questions and creates or checks a specification for an idea. Socratic means it clarifies the idea through guided questions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore ideas such as real-time presence, either through the full question flow or by checking a specification you already supplied.
Why use it?
It turns a vague request into agreed requirements before other work begins.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/lookatitude/guild/ideate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/lookatitude/guild
Per session 37 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,004 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00037 $0.02004
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01002
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00401
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00200

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5648482b3100, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ideate scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/ideate.md · 177 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 177 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/guild:ideate — phase: Ideation

The Ideation phase entrypoint. Runs the Socratic spec flow; the L1 clarify loop runs whenever the resolved loops include spec — true under the default --rigor=standard profile (loops: spec,plan) and under --rigor=deep (loops: all); --rigor=quick (loops: none) skips it.

Verb↔phase edge: /guild:ideate → Ideation. Phase concept binding: lifecycle/phase-entrypoints.md · lifecycle/lifecycle-overview.md.

Contract binding

Before producer work begins, this phase resolves the frozen guild.phase_entry.v1 contract. The Tier-2 defaults: config folded at intake is controlled by P1-config-001 — see /guild:config for the schema.

Usage

/guild:ideate "realtime presence"
/guild:ideate "realtime presence" --skip

All five global flags + --dry-run apply. The --rigor profile expansion (rigorProfile() in scripts/read-guild-config.ts) decides the L1 loop: standard and deep both expand to a loops set containing spec; only quick turns it off.

Args & local flags

  • Args: [brief]
  • Local flags:
    • --skip — validate a supplied spec instead of asking the full question set.

Gates (default)

  • Spec-approval I
  • G-ideation review A

Output artifact

.guild/spec/<idea-slug>.md, .guild/runs/<run-id>/assumptions.md, .guild/runs/<run-id>/questions.md, .guild/runs/<run-id>/review/spec/* (G-ideation broker trail), optional .guild/research/<idea-slug>.md.

PCR-Ideation must-exist floor: .guild/spec/<slug>.md, .guild/runs/<run-id>/assumptions.md, .guild/runs/<run-id>/questions.md, .guild/runs/<run-id>/review/spec/*. Binding: docs/v2/lifecycle.html §Host-portable phase contract. Ref: DRIFT-ANALYSIS CMD-005.

Run-start preflight (settings-control-and-tmux U3/U6)

Before the brainstorm / clarify loop begins — and before run-trace start — the run-trace CLI runs this preflight for you — you do not call runStartPreflight yourself.

Since wave 2, run-trace.js start (below) is the sole caller of runStartPreflight (scripts/lib/runstart-preflight.ts; canonical contract in guild.md §Run-start preflight): on start the CLI resolves the 7-source inheritance chain, validates closed keys, probes tmux, detects providers, and writes .guild/runs/<id>/resolved-settings.json (+ a compact settings_ref in run.yaml) automatically before the run opens. If this command needs the resolved config — e.g. the dispatch backend effective.agent_mode — read the snapshot back with readResolvedSettingsSnapshot(runId, { cwd }); never re-resolve.

Read the full file on GitHub · 177 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 177 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 5648482b3100

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ideate is a command published in the GitHub repository lookatitude/guild (7 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 2,004 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.