ce:ideate

ce:ideate is a skill for Claude Code from gvkhosla/compound-engineering-pi. It costs 101 tokens per session (3,723 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for generating and ranking improvement ideas for a software project. It helps decide which ideas are worth exploring before defining detailed requirements.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore project improvements, rank possible directions, and prepare one idea for a later brainstorming step.
Why use it?
It provides a way to compare possible improvements instead of jumping straight into the first idea.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the compound-engineering plugin — 41 skills, 1 MCP server shipped together

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install compound-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 41 skills, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ce:ideate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gvkhosla/compound-engineering-pi/ce-ideate.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gvkhosla/compound-engineering-pi/ce-ideate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gvkhosla/compound-engineering-pi/ce-ideate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gvkhosla/compound-engineering-pi/ce-ideate.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 101 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,723 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 5.1 $0.00101 $0.03723
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.01861
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00745
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00372

Measured 6d ago against content hash 040590324618, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, 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 6d 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.

plugins/compound-engineering/skills/ce-ideate/SKILL.md · 371 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 371 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Generate Improvement Ideas

Note: The current year is 2026. Use this when dating ideation documents and checking recent ideation artifacts.

ce:ideate precedes ce:brainstorm.

  • ce:ideate answers: "What are the strongest ideas worth exploring?"
  • ce:brainstorm answers: "What exactly should one chosen idea mean?"
  • ce: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

<focus_hint> #$ARGUMENTS </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. Do not let extra process obscure this pattern.
  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 - Write the ideation document before presenting results so work survives interruptions.
  7. Route action into brainstorming - Ideation identifies promising directions; ce:brainstorm defines the selected one precisely enough for planning.

Read the full file on GitHub · 371 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. 6d ago First seen · 371 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A 040590324618

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ce:ideate is a skill published in the GitHub repository gvkhosla/compound-engineering-pi (51 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 3,723 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

codex-claude-worker

Translate natural-language user requests into bounded Claude Code worker tasks while Codex or ChatGPT remains the supervisor. Use when the user gives an ordinary prompt and wants Codex to clarify scope, choose a safe work boundary, generate a worker prompt, approve or defer worker execution, read run summaries and…

zhuzai-2007/claude-code-mcp-harness · 86 tokens

write-swift

How to write modern Swift well — modeling with value types, Swift 6 data-race safety and approachable concurrency (@concurrent, main-actor-by-default, actors, task groups), protocols and generics (some vs any), API design, performance and ARC, Swift Testing, macros, and the modern language features agents don't know…

wangmiaozero/pi-harness · 107 tokens

emil-design-eng

This skill encodes Emil Kowalski's philosophy on UI polish, component design, animation decisions, and the invisible details that make software feel great.

wangmiaozero/pi-harness · 35 tokens

source-research

Research open-source libraries with evidence-backed answers and GitHub permalinks. Use when the user asks about library internals, needs implementation details with source code references, wants to understand why something was changed, or needs authoritative answers backed by actual code. Excels at navigating large…

aretw0/agents-lab · 71 tokens

apple-design

Apple's approach to interface design and fluid, physical motion, translated for the web. Use when building or reviewing gesture-driven UI, spring animations, drag/swipe/sheet interactions, momentum and interruptible transitions, translucent materials and depth, typography (optical sizing, tracking, leading)…

wangmiaozero/pi-harness · 80 tokens

provider-model-discovery

Descobre e seleciona modelos de providers LLM de forma report-only: inventário read-only de modelos, docs oficiais, quota/billing/rate gates e shortlist para canary protegido. Use antes de adicionar providers, escolher modelos ou migrar monitores/roteamento.

aretw0/agents-lab · 60 tokens