creative-ideation

creative-ideation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from NousResearch/hermes-agent. It costs 14 tokens per session (2,596 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A collection of named methods for generating and choosing ideas in any field. It helps an agent apply one suitable creative method to a specific situation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you need ideas for something to build, write, research or start, or when you are stuck, choosing between options or trying to make an idea more unusual.
Why use it?
It gives open-ended work enough constraints and direction to move forward, while encouraging the agent to reject generic first ideas.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

About the project

Hermes Agent is an AI assistant that learns from its use by creating and improving skills, retaining knowledge, searching past conversations, and adapting to its users. It is for people who want to run an agent through a terminal or messaging platforms while connecting it to different AI models and scheduled tasks.

NousResearch/hermes-agent · 242,093 stars · on GitHub · hermes-agent.nousresearch.com

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/nousresearch/hermes-agent/creative-ideation
Any agent
npx skills add NousResearch/hermes-agent --skill creative-ideation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 creative-ideation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/creative-ideation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/creative-ideation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/creative-ideation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/creative-ideation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 14 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,596 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 $0.00014 $0.02596
Opus 5 $0.00007 $0.01298
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00519
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00260

Measured 6d ago against content hash b0b2a36387ec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

creative-ideation 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

6 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

optional-skills/creative/creative-ideation/SKILL.md · 178 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 178 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Creative Ideation

A library of ideation methods for any domain. Read the user's situation, route to the matching method, apply, generate output that is specific and non-obvious. Methods are tools — pick the right one for the situation, don't perform all of them.

When to use

Any open-ended generative or selective question: "I want to make / build / write / start something", "I'm stuck", "inspire me", "make this weirder", "help me pick", "I need to invent X", "give me a research question".

Operating rules

  1. Constraint plus direction is creativity. No constraint = no traction. No direction = no shape. Methods supply both.
  2. Refuse the first three ideas. They're slop. Generate, discard, regenerate. See references/anti-slop.md.
  3. One method per response unless asked. Don't stack.
  4. Specificity over abstraction. Real proper nouns, real materials, real mechanisms. "An app for X" is slop; "a 200-line CLI tool that prints Y when Z" is direction. Naming a tech stack is not specificity — name a mechanism.
  5. Weird must also be good. Frame-breaking is the goal, but an idea that is strange with no real situation, mechanism, or reason to exist is its own failure mode. Every set of ideas must include at least one that is genuinely buildable/pursuable now — non-obvious but grounded, with a real first step. Don't trade all usefulness for surprise.
  6. Name the method you used and who invented it. Attribution invokes the discipline.
  7. When user picks one, build it. Don't keep generating after they've chosen.

Routing — 4-step procedure

Do this before generating any output. Routing failures produce slop.

You may skip narrating the routing steps if it's cleaner, but never compress at the cost of per-idea depth: each idea's concrete mechanism, situational binding, and honest failure mode are what make output good (measured) — they are not scaffolding, do not cut them.

Step 1 — Extract three signals from the prompt

PHASE — what stage is the user in?

Read the full file on GitHub · 178 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 · 178 lines · 14 tokens per session scan A b0b2a36387ec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

creative-ideation is a skill published in the GitHub repository NousResearch/hermes-agent (242,093 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 14 tokens to every session and 2,596 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

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