ideate

ideate is a skill for Claude Code from nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills. It costs 210 tokens per session (3,898 once invoked), scanned B, original, MIT.

A structured method for turning a vague idea or an existing project into a written concept brief and phased roadmap.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore an idea, challenge its assumptions, choose one direction, define success and a kill criterion, and produce CONCEPT_BRIEF.md for later build planning.
Why use it?
It helps prevent detailed specifications from being written before the idea is tested, and keeps important decisions from being lost between sessions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the idea-to-ship-skills plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to explore an idea, challenge its assumptions, choose one direction, define success and a kill criterion, and produce CONCEPT_BRIEF.md for later build planning.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills/ideate
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.

Any agent
npx skills add nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills --skill ideate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install idea-to-ship-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

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 ideate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills/ideate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills/ideate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills/ideate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills/ideate/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for ideate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills/ideate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills/ideate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 210 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,898 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00210 $0.03898
Opus 5 $0.00105 $0.01949
Sonnet 5 $0.00042 $0.00780
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00390

Measured 10d ago against content hash 07d5aac89142, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

ideate scanned grade B with 1 finding 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 10d 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.

Instruction-override phrasingmediumPrompt injection

Text telling the model to disregard its earlier instructions or safety rules is the shape of a prompt injection, whoever wrote it.

**Phase 2 — Pressure-test (the gate).** This is where `ideate` earns its keep. Run the pressure-test battery: honest two-sided assessment with a verdict; competitor buckets; the viability lens that fits the concept's *ty

Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • ideate — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
skills/ideate/SKILL.md · 141 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 141 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ideate — fuzzy idea → locked concept + roadmap

ideate is the upstream partner to the prompt-pack skill. It takes an idea that's still fuzzy — or an existing project you want to evaluate and improve — and runs it through a disciplined funnel that ends in one durable artifact: a CONCEPT_BRIEF.md holding the locked concept, the honest verdict, and a phased roadmap. That brief is exactly what prompt-pack consumes to produce build prompts.

The whole pipeline:

ideate → CONCEPT_BRIEF.md → prompt-pack → execute

This skill encodes a method reverse-engineered from real, successful idea→ship journeys — including the mistakes those journeys made, so it improves on them rather than repeating them.

Why this exists (the problem it solves)

Left unstructured, ideation with an AI fails in predictable ways:

  • It specs too early. A full data model and endpoints get written before anyone asks "is this even a good idea?" — so effort pours into an unvalidated concept.
  • It forgets. The AI re-derives the same "is this a business?" assessment every session; the user re-pastes context; decisions never settle. (This is the single biggest failure.)
  • It has no finish line. No success metric, no kill criterion — so the concept mutates forever and no one can say whether it's working.
  • It over-commits. A giant roadmap gets locked before the first piece is validated.
  • It drifts (when improving an existing thing) away from the original it was supposed to preserve.

ideate fixes each of these with a specific mechanism (see Pitfalls). Its center of gravity is one living brief, edited in place — never regenerated.

The prime directive (the ordering rule)

Never produce implementation detail, a giant roadmap, or a name before the concept has survived an honest pressure-test. The order is explore → pressure-test → converge → then roadmap/handoff. If the user asks to skip ahead ("just give me the build plan"), name the risk, lock the minimum needed, and offer to proceed — but do not silently spec an unvalidated concept.

Read the full file on GitHub · 141 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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.

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. 10d ago First seen · 141 lines · 210 tokens per session scan B 07d5aac89142

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ideate is a skill published in the GitHub repository nelsonwerd/idea-to-ship-skills (83 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 210 tokens to every session and 3,898 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (instruction-override phrasing). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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