ce-ideate

An idea-generation skill for finding and evaluating possible improvements before choosing one to develop. It grounds ideas in the repository, meaning the project’s existing files and context.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you need candidate ideas for a product or engineering problem. It ranks the survivors and points the user toward a later brainstorming step.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from jumping straight into requirements, plans, or code before comparing alternatives. Each idea is critiqued, including those that are rejected.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,601 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 $0.00055 $0.01601
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00800
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00320
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00160

Measured 2d ago against content hash 896313cc31b0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ce-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/ce-ideate/SKILL.md · 74 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 74 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Generate Improvement Ideas

The current year is 2026 — use it when dating documents and checking recent artifacts.

ce-ideate runs before ce-brainstorm. This skill answers "which ideas are worth exploring?" ce-brainstorm then answers what one chosen idea should mean. ce-plan answers how it gets built.

Done: a ranked ideation artifact is written to <root>/ideation/ when that root is present, else to a CE temp path. Every idea generated has been critiqued, and the survivors are explained. The user is left holding the next-steps menu. No requirements, plans, or code.

Boundaries

  1. Ground before ideating. No advice detached from the repo.
  2. Generate many, critique all, explain survivors only. Generate the full candidate list before critiquing any of it. Rejection is explicit and carries a reason; this is not optimistic ranking.
  3. Route action into brainstorming. Never skip from ideation output to planning.
  4. Never dispatch on an unidentified subject. Ask instead, through the host's blocking question tool already in the current tool list (match by capability, not by a host-specific name). Presence in the current tool list is proof the tool exists; never call a user-facing question tool to discover whether it exists. If a matching tool is listed but unloaded, use the host's tool-discovery primitive to load that capability — do not search for another host's tool name. Where no such tool is in the list, offer numbered options on the user-visible surface. Never skip a question silently. Keep "Surprise me" a real option, alongside a Cancel that exits cleanly. Do not ask about solution direction, constraints, audience, tone, or success criteria — ce-brainstorm owns those. If it takes more than 3 questions, ideation is the wrong workflow.
  5. Never print the internal taxonomy label. The labels repo-grounded, elsewhere-software, and elsewhere-non-software route dispatch only. Describe the mode to the user in the topic's own words.
  6. Warn and proceed when grounding fails.
  7. Surface the cost line before dispatching.

Read the full file on GitHub · 74 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 · 74 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 896313cc31b0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ce-ideate is a skill published in the GitHub repository EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (24,760 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,601 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.