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/mthines/agent-skills/ideatenpx skills add mthines/agent-skills --skill ideategit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mthines/agent-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/ideate)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/ideate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/ideate.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00143 | $0.02952 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00072 | $0.01476 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00029 | $0.00590 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00014 | $0.00295 |
Grade A, and why
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 194 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Ideate
Turns a problem statement into a small set of validated, evolved ideas by simulating a nominal group of independent generators, scoring with independent judges, and breeding the winners — instead of asking one context for a list and polishing it.
This
SKILL.mdis a thin index. Phase procedures live inrules/*.mdand load on demand. The evidence behind every numerical default lives inreferences/ideation-research.md— section references below (§) point there, and its defaults tables flag which numbers are study values vs the skill's own operationalizations.
Contents
- Mode Detection
- Workflow
- Quick vs deep
- Composition
- Core Principles
- Self-Improvement
- Anti-patterns
- Definition of Done
Mode Detection
Parse $ARGUMENTS:
| Mode | Default | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
quick |
quick token, or auto-triage says small. |
|
deep |
deep token, or auto-triage says open-ended. |
|
| auto | yes | No mode token — run the depth triage table below. |
| Flag | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
--n <count> |
unset | Optional cap on the Lead-finalists list. Unset by default — the finalist count is emergent from the quality bar (see idea-scoring.md § Selection rules). --n only narrows; it never manufactures finalists the bar did not admit. |
--no-framing |
off | Skip Phase 1 (problem is already well-framed). |
Everything else in $ARGUMENTS is the problem statement.
If it is missing, ask for it — never ideate on a guessed problem.
What ships with it
7 files 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.
- 5d ago First seen · 194 lines · 143 tokens per session scan A 3f26d44d91e8
ideate is a skill published in the GitHub repository mthines/agent-skills (12 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 143 tokens to every session and 2,952 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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