ideate

A workflow that examines a project and produces a ranked set of improvement ideas before one idea is developed further.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want grounded suggestions for improving a repository, then save the results in docs/ideation/ for later brainstorming.
Why use it?
It filters out weak suggestions and records the strongest candidates, helping teams choose what is worth exploring before writing requirements or code.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/aegntic/compound-engineering/ideate
Any agent
npx skills add aegntic/compound-engineering --skill ideate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aegntic/compound-engineering

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,107 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 $0.00019 $0.03107
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01554
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00621
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00311

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2a510edc6471, 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.

skills/ideate/SKILL.md · 349 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 349 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ideate

Generate improvement ideas that are grounded in the actual repository, reject weak ones aggressively, and preserve the strongest survivors in docs/ideation/ before handing one off to /workflows:brainstorm.

Use this when the user wants the AI to suggest what to improve rather than refine an idea they already chose.

  • ideate answers: "What are the strongest ideas worth exploring?"
  • /workflows:brainstorm answers: "What exactly should one chosen idea mean?"
  • /workflows:plan answers: "How should it be built?"

This workflow produces a ranked ideation artifact in docs/ideation/. It does not produce requirements, plans, or code.

Interaction Method

Use the platform's blocking question tool when available (AskUserQuestion in Claude Code, request_user_input in Codex, ask_user in Gemini). Otherwise, present numbered options in chat and wait for the user's reply before proceeding.

Ask one question at a time. Prefer concise single-select choices when natural options exist.

Focus Hint

Interpret any provided argument as optional context. It may be:

  • a concept such as DX improvements
  • a path such as plugins/compound-engineering/skills/
  • a constraint such as low-complexity quick wins
  • a volume hint such as top 3, 100 ideas, or raise the bar

If no argument is provided, proceed with open-ended ideation.

Core Principles

  1. Ground before ideating - Scan the actual codebase first. Do not generate abstract product advice detached from the repository.
  2. Diverge before judging - Generate the full idea set before evaluating any individual idea.
  3. Use adversarial filtering - The quality mechanism is explicit rejection with reasons, not optimistic ranking.
  4. Preserve the original prompt mechanism - Generate many ideas, critique the whole list, then explain only the survivors in detail.
  5. Use agent diversity to improve the candidate pool - Parallel sub-agents are a support mechanism for richer idea generation and critique, not the core workflow itself.
  6. Preserve the artifact early enough - Before any handoff or session end, write the ideation document so the work survives interruptions.
  7. Route action into brainstorming - Ideation identifies promising directions; /workflows:brainstorm defines the selected one precisely enough for planning.

Read the full file on GitHub · 349 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 · 349 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A 2a510edc6471

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ideate is a skill published in the GitHub repository aegntic/compound-engineering (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 3,107 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

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