creative-thinking-for-research

creative-thinking-for-research is a skill for Claude Code from Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs. It costs 50 tokens per session (4,675 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of creativity methods from cognitive science for generating new computer science and AI research ideas. It uses approaches such as combining concepts, making analogies, changing constraints, and exploring contradictions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find novel research directions, connect fields, reframe problems, and prepare research ideation sessions.
Why use it?
It gives structured ways to move beyond obvious or incremental ideas when ordinary brainstorming has stalled.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the ideation plugin — 2 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to find novel research directions, connect fields, reframe problems, and prepare research ideation sessions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/creative-thinking-for-research
About the project

AI Research Skills Library is a collection of reusable instructions that guide AI agents through research and machine-learning engineering tasks, from finding ideas and writing papers to training, evaluation, and deployment. It is for configuring agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini to perform research workflows.

Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs · 12,567 stars · on GitHub · orchestra-research.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.

Any agent
npx skills add Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs --skill creative-thinking-for-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ideation, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 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 creative-thinking-for-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/creative-thinking-for-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/creative-thinking-for-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/creative-thinking-for-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/creative-thinking-for-research/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 creative-thinking-for-research

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/creative-thinking-for-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/creative-thinking-for-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,675 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 18 Mar 2026
  • Snyk pass 23 Feb 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00050 $0.04675
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.02337
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00935
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00468

Measured 8d ago against content hash ec111f9236d7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

creative-thinking-for-research 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 8d 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

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

21-research-ideation/creative-thinking-for-research/SKILL.md · 367 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 367 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Creative Thinking for Research

Eight empirically grounded frameworks from cognitive science, applied to computer science and AI research. Unlike ad-hoc brainstorming, each framework here is backed by decades of creativity research — from Koestler's bisociation to Kauffman's adjacent possible. They target distinct cognitive operations: combining, reformulating, analogizing, constraining, inverting, abstracting, exploring boundaries, and holding contradictions.

When to Use This Skill

  • Generating genuinely novel ideas, not incremental extensions of prior work
  • Feeling trapped in a local optimum of thinking within a single subfield
  • Wanting to systematically apply creativity heuristics rather than waiting for inspiration
  • Preparing for a research retreat or PhD-level ideation session
  • Bridging between fields and seeking structural (not superficial) connections

Do NOT use this skill when:

  • You need structured project-level brainstorming workflows (use brainstorming-research-ideas)
  • You have a well-defined problem and need execution help (use domain-specific skills)
  • You need a literature survey (use scientific-skills:literature-review)

Relationship to Brainstorm skill: The brainstorm skill provides operational workflows (diverge → converge → refine) and practical filters. This skill provides the deeper cognitive engines that power creative leaps. Use them together: creative-thinking to generate raw insight, brainstorm to structure and evaluate it.


Framework 1: Combinatorial Creativity (Bisociation)

Novel ideas arise from combining existing concepts in unexpected ways. Arthur Koestler called this bisociation — connecting two previously unrelated frames of reference, as distinct from routine association within a single frame.

Why it works: Meta-research consistently shows that breadth of knowledge is a precursor to creative output. People who read across disciplines produce more novel work. The combination itself is the creative act.

Read the full file on GitHub · 367 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. 8d ago First seen · 367 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A ec111f9236d7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

creative-thinking-for-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs (12,567 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 4,675 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-03.

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