idea-creator

idea-creator is a skill for Claude Code from zjunlp/Mechanist. It costs 47 tokens per session (3,069 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research-idea planning tool that turns a broad topic into specific ideas and ranks them for further investigation. Research ideas are possible questions or projects that could lead to a published study.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to generate, compare, and initially test research ideas, including optional literature, novelty, review, and small pilot checks.
Why use it?
It gives structure to early brainstorming and helps separate promising directions from weaker ones before you spend significant time on them.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Not installable on its own: it reads a path above its own folder, which only exists inside its repository. The line is - **[Output Versioning Protocol](../shared-references/output-versioning.md)** — write timestamped file first, then copy to fixed name.

Part of the mechanist plugin — 54 skills, 4 agents shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add zjunlp/Mechanist
Claude Code
/plugin install mechanist

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mechanist, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 54 skills, 4 agents.

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 idea-creator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zjunlp/mechanist/idea-creator.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zjunlp/mechanist/idea-creator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zjunlp/mechanist/idea-creator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zjunlp/mechanist/idea-creator.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,069 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 $0.00047 $0.03069
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.01535
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00614
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00307

Measured 6d ago against content hash 29c767717673, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

idea-creator 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.

skills/idea-creator/SKILL.md · 237 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 237 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Idea Creator

Generate publishable research ideas for: $ARGUMENTS

Overview

Given a broad research direction from the user, systematically generate, validate, and rank concrete research ideas. This skill composes with /research-lit, /novelty-check, and /research-review to form a complete idea discovery pipeline.

Constants

  • PILOT_MAX_HOURS = 4 — Skip any pilot estimated to take > 4 hours per GPU. Flag as "needs manual pilot".
  • PILOT_TIMEOUT_HOURS = 6 — Hard timeout: kill pilots exceeding 6 hours. Collect partial results if available.
  • MAX_PILOT_IDEAS = 6 — Pilot at most 6 ideas in parallel. Additional ideas are validated on paper only.
  • MAX_TOTAL_GPU_HOURS = 10 — Total GPU budget for all pilots combined.
  • REVIEWER_BACKEND = llm-chat — External LLM reviewer via llm-chat MCP for brainstorming (Phase 2 idea generation) and review (Phase 4 devil's-advocate critique). Model defers to LLM_MODEL env. Always ask the external reviewer for strict, high-rigor feedback. Override with — reviewer: oracle-pro via Oracle MCP.
  • OUTPUT_DIR = idea-stage/ — All idea-stage outputs go here. Create the directory if it doesn't exist.

💡 Override via argument, e.g., /idea-creator "topic" — pilot budget: 4h per idea, 20h total.

Workflow

Phase 1: Load Landscape + Banlist (produced by /research-lit)

Division of labor. /research-lit is the canonical owner of the landscape and banlist. Its Step 0 reads any existing prior banlist and its Step 5 synthesizes everything into idea-stage/LANDSCAPE.md — paper table + 3-5 paragraph narrative + structural gaps + a ## 5. Banlist — Failed Ideas section. This skill does not survey the literature; it consumes that file.

Path A — auto-claim chain (the normal path). If idea-stage/LANDSCAPE.md exists non-empty, Read it. Treat it as the canonical landscape, and treat its ## 5. Banlist — Failed Ideas section as ideas NOT to regenerate. Do not re-survey. This is the explicit auditable source and avoids drift if an in-context survey would later be summarized away in a long session.

Read the full file on GitHub · 237 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 · 237 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 29c767717673

Subscribe to this mod's changes

idea-creator is a skill published in the GitHub repository zjunlp/Mechanist (55 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 3,069 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.