Agent skill · creative production · nousresearch
creative-ideation
Generate ideas via named methods from creative practice.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a structured library of creative methods that the AI can apply to generate specific and non-obvious ideas in various domains.
What it needs
About 6k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 226,679 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
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. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills nousresearch/creative-ideation