next-idea

A decision-making workflow that proposes one high-value addition to an existing project. It first studies the project, considers possible directions, and argues for the strongest next move.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when deciding what to build next, choosing the best improvement, or looking for a single major addition to an existing project.
Why use it?
Project teams often face too many plausible ideas and no clear priority. This workflow narrows the choice to one recommendation grounded in the project’s current state.

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/mayank-io/mstack/next-idea
Any agent
npx skills add mayank-io/mstack --skill next-idea
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mayank-io/mstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,228 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 $0.00088 $0.01228
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00614
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00246
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00123

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6f7fa33a0eae, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

next-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.

plugins/dev/skills/next-idea/SKILL.md · 98 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 98 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Next Idea

Identify the single highest-leverage addition the project could make right now. Not a list, not a roadmap — one idea, fully argued.

The Question

What's the single smartest and most radically innovative and accretive and useful and compelling addition you could make to the project at this point?

Procedure

  1. Ground yourself in the project. Before generating ideas, read enough of the repository to know what exists. At minimum: top-level README.md, the directory structure, any CLAUDE.md / design docs, and the most recent commits (git log --oneline -20). If a dashboard or project plan exists (e.g. docs/dashboard.md), read it. Skim, don't deep-dive — you need shape, not detail.
  2. Generate a wide candidate set, silently. Brainstorm 8–15 candidate additions internally. Do NOT show this list to the user. Cover different axes: new capability, new UX, new integration, new abstraction, new audience, new business model, new defensive moat, removing something, inverting an assumption.
  3. Score each candidate on four dimensions:
    • Smart: non-obvious, leverages something unique about this project's position.
    • Radically innovative: surprises a reader; not a "fast follow."
    • Accretive: compounds with what already exists rather than replacing it.
    • Useful & compelling: a real user (or self) would be visibly better off; the idea is easy to want.
  4. Pick the single winner. If two are close, pick the one with the larger blast radius if it works.
  5. Stress-test it. Spend a moment trying to kill the idea: what's the strongest objection, what would have to be true for it to fail, what's the cheapest experiment that would falsify it. Keep the answers — they go in the output.
  6. Write the output in the exact format below.

Output Format

Follow BLUF + Pyramid Principle strictly. Hierarchical numbering on every header. No prose before §1. No preamble like "Here's my analysis." Start at ## 1. Objective.

Read the full file on GitHub · 98 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 · 98 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A 6f7fa33a0eae

Subscribe to this mod's changes

next-idea is a skill published in the GitHub repository mayank-io/mstack (5 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 1,228 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.

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