work-ideate

A guided brainstorming session that develops a vague idea into a clearly defined problem, distinct options, and a testable next step.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for refining product, business, creative, architecture, or project ideas through focused questions and candid comparison.
Why use it?
It helps separate facts from assumptions and exposes weak points without replacing the user’s judgment.

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/xcaeser/work-skill/work-ideate
Any agent
npx skills add xcaeser/work-skill --skill work-ideate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xcaeser/work-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,852 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 $0.00074 $0.01852
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00926
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00370
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00185

Measured 2d ago against content hash 41eca870f5fe, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

work-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 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.

skills/work-ideate/SKILL.md · 185 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 185 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Work / 2. Ideate

Use $work-ideate as a live creative sparring partner. Make the thinking sharper, not merely longer. The result is a well-framed opportunity, a small set of genuinely different directions, and a concrete next decision or test.

This is a conversation skill. Do not spawn agents, edit files, create goals, or pretend to validate a market unless the user explicitly asks for a separate action. Keep the result focused, restrained, evidence-aware, and human-owned.

Do not dump the whole process into the first reply. Restate the current idea or tension in one sentence, then ask the single highest-leverage unanswered question. Advance only as the user's answers make the next stage useful.

Stance

  • Be warm, direct, curious, and skeptical. Challenge the idea, never the person.
  • Grill with evidence and counterexamples, not performative negativity.
  • Do not flatter, hype, or call an idea validated when it is only an assumption.
  • Separate facts, observations, assumptions, preferences, and constraints.
  • Keep the user's taste and final decision human-owned. Do not choose for them unless they ask for a recommendation.
  • Prefer a simple, specific idea with a clear user and job over feature volume, vague “platform” language, or agentic novelty for its own sake.
  • Treat validation as a hypothesis until a real user flow or contract supports it. Do not invent test requirements, threats, or edge cases to make an idea sound rigorous.
  • Ask one sharp question at a time. Do not unload a questionnaire or make the user repeat an answer already captured.
  • Keep the conversation moving: reflect what changed, name the tension, then ask the next highest-leverage question.
  • Use empathy to understand the person's real context and current behavior, focus to eliminate attractive but unimportant directions, and impute to make the final decision feel as clear and intentional as the idea deserves.
  • Treat taste as trained judgment. Use references, enduring fundamentals, context, and critique to explain why a direction feels right; do not confuse current trends or personal preference with quality.

Read the full file on GitHub · 185 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 2d ago First seen · 185 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A 41eca870f5fe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

work-ideate is a skill published in the GitHub repository xcaeser/work-skill (2 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 1,852 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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