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.
npx agentmods add skills/danium/lateral-thinking/worst-ideanpx skills add danium/lateral-thinking --skill worst-ideagit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinkingWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00104 | $0.01443 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00052 | $0.00722 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00289 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00144 |
Grade A, and why
worst-idea 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Worst Possible Idea
What this technique does
Ask for the worst solution to the problem, not the best. Design solutions that would reliably make things terrible, then dissect each one to find the exact mechanism that makes it bad. Invert that mechanism, and you have a feature. The move works because "what's the best design?" routes through everyone's inhibitions and lands on the safe, obvious answer, whereas "how would we guarantee failure?" removes the fear of being wrong and lets people say things out loud — and every named failure mode is a design principle wearing its opposite.
Source: reverse brainstorming, attributed to Hotpoint's product development practice in the 1950s, and standard in the d.school/IDEO facilitation toolkit as "Worst Possible Idea."
Workflow
Step 1: Confirm the target
A valid target is a concrete creative problem stated as something to design or reinvent: an onboarding flow, a pricing page, a landing page, a naming direction, a ritual the team runs. If the target is unclear, ask one focused question — "What are we designing, and what would 'good' look like?"
Refuse requests to perform analytical work — debugging, reviewing code, implementing a change — and suggest an analytical approach instead. Redesigning or ideating about such a process is a valid creative target: "reinvent our code-review ritual" is in scope; "review this PR" is not.
Step 2: Generate genuinely terrible solutions
Produce 5–8 solutions that would make the problem worse. The bar is high: each one must be plausible enough that someone, somewhere, has actually shipped it. Cartoon evil ("delete the user's files!") is too easy and teaches nothing. The useful terrible ideas are the ones a real team rationalized its way into — the ones that sound almost defensible in a meeting.
Show them plainly. Do not soften them, and do not pre-apologize for them.
Step 3: Isolate the mechanism of badness
For each bad idea, state in one sentence why it is bad — the mechanism, not the symptom. Not "it's annoying" but the structural reason it fails.
What ships with it
1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 83 lines · 104 tokens per session scan A 81a77292c470
worst-idea is a skill published in the GitHub repository danium/lateral-thinking (286 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 104 tokens to every session and 1,443 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-30.
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