/ce-ideate

name: ce-ideate
description: "Generate and evaluate grounded ideas. Use when the user asks for ideas, improvements, surprising options, or AI-generated directions before choosing one to develop; use ce-brainstorm to refine the user's own idea."
argument-hint: "[feature, focus area, or constraint] [output:md]"

Generate Improvement Ideas

**Note: The current year is 2026.** Use this when dating ideation documents and checking recent ideation artifacts.

`ce-ideate` precedes `ce-brainstorm`.

• `ce-ideate` answers: "What are the strongest ideas worth exploring?"
• `ce-brainstorm` answers: "What exactly should one chosen idea mean?" and writes a requirements-only unified plan under `<root>/plans/`.
• `ce-plan` answers: "How should it be built?"

This workflow produces a ranked ideation artifact — written to `<root>/ideation/` when present, else a CE temp path (see Phase 4). It does **not** produce requirements, plans, or code.

Setup

Run this once at the start of this invocation, before any subagent dispatch, and follow the directives it prints — except where one conflicts with this skill's own rules on asking the user questions, whether those rules are scoped to a non-interactive mode or apply in every mode, in which case this skill's rules win and no blocking question is asked. Run the fence exactly as written, as its own command: do not pipe or filter it (no `head`, `tail`, or `grep`), do not truncate its output, and do not bundle it into a batch with other commands. Its output opens with a `=== skill context` header and ends with `CE_CONTEXT_END`; if you received one of those lines without the other, the output was truncated — rerun the fence verbatim once. That recovery is the only rerun: otherwise do not rerun it within the same invocation; a later invocation of this or any other skill runs its own. If no Node runtime is available the skill proceeds unchanged.

SKILL_DIR="<absolute path of the directory containing the SKILL.md you just read>";
NODE="$(for c in node nodejs; do command -v "$c" >/dev/null 2>&1 && "$c" -e '' >/dev/null 2>&1 && { echo "$c"; break; }; done)";
if [ -n "$NODE" ]; then
"$NODE" "$SKILL_DIR/scripts/context.mjs" || echo "context script failed; continue with the skill's normal behavior";
else
echo "no Node runtime; continue with the skill's normal behavior";
fi

Interaction Method

Use the platform's blocking question tool: `AskUserQuestion` in Claude Code (call `ToolSearch` with `select:AskUserQuestion` first if its schema isn't loaded), `request_user_input` in Codex, `ask_question` in Antigravity CLI (`agy`), `ask_user` in Pi (requires the `pi-ask-user` extension). Fall back to numbered options in chat only when no blocking tool exists in the harness or the call errors (e.g., Codex edit modes) — not because a schema load is required. Never silently skip the question.

Ask one question at a time. Prefer concise single-select choices when natural options exist.

Focus Hint

The **focus hint** is any optional context this skill was invoked with — present in the current prompt or conversation, whether the user gave it directly or a calling skill passed it. The rest of this skill refers to it as `{focus_hint}` (empty if none was given).

Interpret any provided argument as optional context. It may be:

• a concept such as `DX improvements`
• a path such as `skills/`
• a research artifact to draw on — a file of gathered evidence (social-research report, survey export, analytics dump) at any path, inside or outside the repo (handled in Phase 1's user-supplied research subsection)
• a constraint such as `low-complexity quick wins`
• a volume hint such as `top 3`, `100 ideas`, or `raise the bar`

If no argument is provided, proceed with open-ended ideation.

Artifact Root

This skill writes ideation artifacts under `<root>/ideation/` in repo mode and reads learnings under `<root>/solutions/`. Resolve `<root>` (per the block below) only when you compose such a path — the no-repo / elsewhere flow writes to a temp directory and never needs it, so do not resolve or create a root before mode classification. Pass the resolved path to any subagent when you do resolve it, not the config.

<!-- ce-docs-root:start --> **Resolve the CE artifact root `<root>` before composing any artifact path.**

• **Read** `docs_root` from `<repo-root>/.compound-engineering/config.local.yaml`, then `config.yaml`; first non-empty value wins (`<repo-root>` = `git rev-parse --show-toplevel`). Unset -> `<root>` is `docs`, exactly as before.
• **Validate** a set value: a repo-relative directory whose real, symlink-resolved path stays inside the repo and is neither the repo root nor under `.git/`. Otherwise stop with an error naming `docs_root` and the value -- never fall back to `docs`.
• **Use** `<root>` as the sole artifact location: create it if absent, compose each path as `<root>/<subdir>` with this skill's own subdirectory, and never also read `docs`.

<!-- ce-docs-root:end -->

Core Principles

1. **Ground before ideating** - Scan the actual codebase first. Do not generate abstract product advice detached from the repository. 2. **Generate many -> critique all -> explain survivors only** - The quality mechanism is explicit rejection with reasons, not optimistic ranking. Do not let extra process obscure this pattern. 3. **Route action into brainstorming** - Ideation identifies promising directions; `ce-brainstorm` defines the selected one precisely enough for planning. Do not skip to planning from ideation output.

Model Tiers

Sub-agent dispatch is tiered by task shape, never hardcoded to a model name:

• **Extraction tier** — evidence scouts and other retrieval/quoting work. Use the platform's cheapest capable model when the current harness exposes a known override. "Capable" is part of the spec — escalate to the generation tier when the repo is large or the stack obscure.
• **Generation tier** — evidence-driven ideation frames and basis verification. Use