ce:ideate

ce:ideate is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Jerrylalala/compound-engineering. It costs 20 tokens per session (2,126 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of ce:ideate, MIT.

A guided step for generating and ranking ideas for improving a project before detailed brainstorming or planning.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create a dated ideation document with ranked improvement directions in docs/ideation/. It can account for a topic, project path, complexity limit, or requested number of ideas.
Why use it?
It separates deciding which ideas are worth exploring from defining or building one idea, reducing premature requirements and implementation work.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the compound-engineering plugin — 78 skills, 4 commands, 2 hooks 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/jerrylalala/compound-engineering/ce-ideate
Any agent
npx skills add Jerrylalala/compound-engineering --skill ce-ideate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Jerrylalala/compound-engineering

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install compound-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 78 skills, 4 commands, 2 hooks.

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/jerrylalala/compound-engineering/ce-ideate.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jerrylalala/compound-engineering/ce-ideate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jerrylalala/compound-engineering/ce-ideate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jerrylalala/compound-engineering/ce-ideate.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,126 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 86% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00020 $0.02126
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01063
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00425
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00213

Measured 5d ago against content hash ca39ea6cd1a6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, 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 5d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

86% identical to ce:ideate — 22 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/compound-engineering/skills/ce-ideate/SKILL.md · 157 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 157 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. Generate many -> critique all -> explain survivors only - The quality mechanism is explicit rejection with reasons, not optimistic ranking. Do not let extra process obscure this pattern.
  3. Route action into brainstorming - Ideation identifies promising directions; ce:brainstorm defines the selected one precisely enough for planning. Do not skip to planning from ideation output.

Execution Flow

Phase 0: Resume and Scope

0.1 Check for Recent Ideation Work

Look in docs/ideation/ for ideation documents created within the last 30 days.

Treat a prior ideation doc as relevant when:

  • the topic matches the requested focus
  • the path or subsystem overlaps the requested focus
  • the request is open-ended and there is an obvious recent open ideation doc
  • the issue-grounded status matches: do not offer to resume a non-issue ideation when the current argument indicates issue-tracker intent, or vice versa — treat these as distinct topics

Read the full file on GitHub · 157 lines

Files

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.

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. 5d ago First seen · 157 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A ca39ea6cd1a6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ce:ideate is a skill published in the GitHub repository Jerrylalala/compound-engineering (5 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 2,126 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 86% identical to ce:ideate, differing in 22 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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