Ideate

Customization

Before executing, check for user customizations at: ~/.claude/LIFEOS/USER/CUSTOMIZATIONS/SKILLS/Ideate/

Ideate — The Cognitive Progress Engine

What It Does

Ideate is a loop-controlled evolutionary creativity engine. It runs multiple cycles of consuming, dreaming, stealing, breeding, and testing ideas over simulated time scales from hours to decades, driven by a first-class Loop Controller and a Lamarckian Meta-Learner. It produces ranked novel solution candidates with full provenance — where each idea came from and how it evolved.

The Problem

A single-pass brainstorm collapses fast. Ask a model for ideas and it converges on the obvious handful, biased toward its training distribution, because soft temperature tweaks just reshuffle the same probability mass. You get variations on one theme, not genuinely different directions. Hard problems need ideas that came from somewhere else — a foreign domain, an unexpected recombination, a constraint flipped on its head — and they need a way to kill the weak ones and breed the strong ones across many rounds. One pass can't do that.

How It Works

This is an evolutionary system, not a single-pass tool. This is NOT BeCreative — BeCreative is a single-pass diversity tool. Ideate runs multiple cycles driven by a Loop Controller and a Lamarckian Meta-Learner.

The Core Insight

Human creativity reduces to 5 irreducible functions:

Function	What It Does	Human Analog
INGEST	Gather diverse raw material	Reading, conversations, experiences
PERTURB	Recombine inputs with controlled noise	Dreaming, daydreaming, shower thoughts
CROSS-POLLINATE	Map patterns from foreign domains	"Stealing" ideas from unrelated fields
SELECT	Score against fitness function	Critical thinking, peer review, testing
ITERATE	Feed survivors back as inputs	Sleep cycles, weeks of study, years of work

The 9 workflow phases expand these into a richer human-legible system. DREAM, DAYDREAM, and CONTEMPLATE are PERTURB at different noise levels. MATE is PERTURB on existing ideas. META-LEARN adds the Lamarckian advantage — analyzing WHY ideas worked and steering future generation.