idea

From "we should do something with AI" to a ranked shortlist — or, for a project that is already fixed, from every stakeholder's view to one prioritised register. Markdown skills, one folder.

Version: see VERSION · September 2026 · https://github.com/ditomax/idea

For users, START.md is enough — three steps, no installation. Conversation and output files follow the user's language; headings in the templates stay in English.

For agents

If you are reading this from a link and have no local copy yet:

1. Get one — git clone https://github.com/ditomax/idea or unzip the latest release from https://github.com/ditomax/idea/releases — into a folder the user chooses (default: ./idea next to their other work). That download is the only network access; the "no network" rule in AGENTS.md applies from then on.
2. Work from inside that folder and read its AGENTS.md. Do not act as the Director from this README — the rules live in RULES.md and skills/.
3. Layout: standalone (this folder as is) unless the user has a project with a planning/ folder — then the suite belongs at planning/suite/idea/ and planning/AGENTS.md is the entry point, not this file. That planning/ form is produced by skill-suite-setup (see The suite), never assembled by hand.
4. A clone gives updates via git pull; the user's work in ideas/ is ignored by git, so nothing of it is ever committed to a clone. hooks/ and guard.py are for skillset developers — ignore them.

What it does

idea is the first of three skillsets — idea → maquette → build — that take an organisation from a vague wish to a shipped product without anyone re-explaining what an earlier step already established. This one finds and evaluates ideas:

Stage	"Team member"	Who sits at the table	Result	approx.
1 collect	interviewer	one employee (solo), or one collector who interviews colleagues, or an import of existing ideas	cards/<ID>-card.md — one idea card per idea, evaluation-ready but unscored	45 min per session, 3–5 cards
(merge)	consolidator	the collector between sessions, or the committee inside a round — optional	new cards from existing ones: consolidate (n → 1), umbrella (n → 1, the sources stay as variants), split (1 → n); the originals stay untouched and traceable	15 min per operation
2 evaluate	committee moderator	a committee, one writer at the keyboard	evaluations/<ID>-eval.md per card and 10-shortlist.md — ranked, with reasons	30 min per card, 30 min for the shortlist

Two tracks. The table above is the explore track — for when the ideas are still to be found. When the customer already knows which problem to solve and wants every stakeholder heard first, the workspace runs the focus track instead (chosen once, at the first start):

Stage	"Team member"	Who sits at the table	Result	approx.
1 focus-collect	interviewer	first the person who sets up the project (frame), then one perspective per session — interview, collector, or a mail return	05-frame.md once; contributions/<code>-S<nn>.md per session — goals, constraints, requirements, wishes, concerns, questions, unscored	45 min per session, 8–15 contributions
2 focus-consolidate	consolidator	the moderator, after the sessions	20-register-draft.md — duplicates joined with all sources, contradictions side by side, K.o. candidates flagged; every contribution exactly once	30 min
3 focus-review	committee moderator	a committee, one writer	10-register.md — the project checked as a whole (V1–V10, K.o. decisions, no index), conflicts decided, every item MUST / SHOULD / COULD	60 min

Finished results look like the files in examples/ — one card, its evaluation and a two-entry shortlist for a fictitious company. A Director skill (idea) reads the folder, tells the user where they stand, and calls the stage. The user types start, then next, redo or stop.

Collect never judges; evaluate never generates; merge only regroups what people decided belongs together — it never scores and never drops a line. That separation is the method: the interview surfaces pains before technology, the committee assesses concept maturity — never the person, never the idea — with ten fields, K.o. gates and an index anyone can recompute by hand. Where a K.o. field is unknown, the committee estimates or waives; ideas are never sent back and never silently dropped.

The suite

Repo	What it does
idea — this repo	vague wish → ranked shortlist (10-shortlist.md, contract H1) — or, for a fixed project, every stakeholder's view → prioritised register (10-register.md, contract register/1)
maquette	one shortlist entry → clickable model and brief (60-brief.md, contract H2)
build	brief → product, with concept documents as the source of truth
skill-suite-setup	puts the three into one project folder (planning/) with a profile and a single entry point that knows which skillset is up; builds customer-specific versions

Each skillset works on its own. Anyone who wants more than one of them, or a customer-specific version, gets the planning/ form from skill-suite-setup instead of standalone folders side by side.

Contracts

• Out — H1. 10-shortlist.md (contract H1/2) is read by maquette. The committee names under Maquette order which entry is built next and, for an umbrella entry, which variant the demo shows; maquette ≥ 0.6.0 proposes exactly that entry, the user confirms or picks another — always exactly one. maquette 0.4–0.5 reads the file as H1/1 (lists the entries, ignores the additions). Sparring prefills from the chosen entry instead of asking again. Every entry is self-contained, an umbrella entry including its Variants table.
• Out — register/1 (focus). 10-register.md is a contract of its own, not a shortlist version: one project, its frame, the project check and outcome, and every item R-<n> with its priority. maquette ≥ 0.7.0 and build ≥ 0.2.0 read it and account for every item; older versions start cold, where the file can be pasted.
• In — foreign cards. Ideas that already exist in a spreadsheet or another tool enter through collect's import step, mapped onto cards with the gaps marked [unknown]; the mapping is remembered per format.

Both seams are optional. maquette also starts from an idea in prose; idea also works without maquette.

Compatibility. Out: 10-shortlist.md is contract H1/2 (additive to H1/1), fully read by maquette ≥ 0.6.0, readable as H1/1 by maquette ≥ 0.4.0. 10-register.md is contract register/1 (focus track), read by maquette ≥ 0.7.0 and build ≥ 0.2.0. In: none (foreign cards enter through collect's import). Version triples tested together are listed in skill-suite-setup/compat.md. Changes: CHANGELOG.md.

Structure

idea/
  START.md             three steps for the human
  AGENTS.md            entry point for Codex — turns the agent into the Director
  CLAUDE.md            the same for Claude
  VERSION
  README.md            this file
  RULES.md             shared rules for all stages — frontmatter, write rules, conversation rules, git, contracts
  QUESTIONS.md         every question the skillset asks, with stable IDs — the tailoring surface for profiles
  CHANGELOG.md         what changed per version
  hooks/               pre-commit guard for development clones (see Release)
  ATTRIBUTION.md       where the method comes from
  profile/             optional customer-specific constraints (empty = core defaults)
  examples/            fictitious finished results — a card, an evaluation, a shortlist (Example GmbH)
  ideas/               the users' work, one subfolder per organisation (not in the repo)
  templates/           one template per result file (binding content definition)
    00-idea.md         control file (explore)
    card.md            idea card
    evaluation.md      ten-field evaluation
    10-shortlist.md    handover to maquette (contract H1/2)
    00-idea-focus.md   control file (focus)
    05-frame.md        the fixed project (focus)
    session.md         contributions of one session (focus)
    20-register-draft.md  consolidated items (focus)
    10-register.md     prioritised register — handover (contract register/1)
  skills/
    idea/              Director
    idea-collect/
    idea-merge/        card operations: consolidate, umbrella, split
    idea-evaluate/
    idea-focus-collect/      focus: frame and contribution sessions
    idea-focus-consolidate/  focus: register draft
    idea-focus-review/       focus: project check, priorities, register

Inside a project

The workspace above is the standalone form. Inside a project folder the suite is copied to planning/suite/idea/ (read-only), the work lives in planning/idea/, the profile in planning/profile/. maquette and build sit next to it under the same planning/. The Director recognises the layout by the planning/ folder — nothing to configure.

Distribution and installation

This folder is the workspace — repo and ZIP have the same structure. Users download the ZIP of a release, unzip it, open the folder in their AI app and type "start" (see START.md). AGENTS.md (Codex) and CLAUDE.md (Claude) are read automatically and make the agent the Director — nothing to install, no symlinks, no global skill folders.

Developers who want the skills globally can additionally:

ln -s "$PWD/skills/"idea* ~/.codex/skills/      # or ~/.claude/skills/

No dependencies, no network access, no telemetry. ideas/ is excluded from the repo via .gitignore.

Chat tools without folder access (plain ChatGPT, Le Chat, Perplexity): the collect stage of idea can run there as a single prompt file. Ask us for one, or render it yourself with skill-suite-setup: python3 setup.py new <name>, then python3 setup.py prompt <name> idea-collect — the file lands in dist/; a profile is optional, its scope and tailored questions go into the prompt. The other stages need a folder.

Profiles

Customer-specific variants (restricted topics, IT constraints, standards, corporate design, the customer's own review process, questions skipped or added) do not fork this repo. They live in a profile/ folder the Director reads at start; a profile may restrict, never loosen. The format is specified in skill-suite-setup/PROFILE.md; a minimal example is in profile/README.md. QUESTIONS.md lists every question the skillset asks, with stable IDs — read it before a session, and use the IDs in a profile to skip or add questions.

Language

All skill text, template headings, frontmatter keys and status values are English. The conversation follows the user's language (German → informal "du"). The language of the result files is resolved by the Director: English by default → profile → the language the user writes in → an explicit statement by the user ("I write German, the cards shall be English").

Git

Optional. Skills never create a repository; if one exists, a commit marks a frozen state (a card done, an evaluation done, the shortlist done) and nothing else — the policy is in RULES.md §6.

Release

Development clones activate the customer-data guard once: git config core.hooksPath hooks (the hook calls guard.py from the sibling skill-suite-setup repo and blocks commits that carry customer markers). Release ZIPs are built with skill-suite-setup/release.py, which ships only git-tracked, allowlisted, guard-clean files.

Repository: https://github.com/ditomax/idea — releases at https://github.com/ditomax/idea/releases.

New version: bump VERSION, tag vX.Y.Z, GitHub release with the folder attached as idea-vX.Y.Z.zip. Users update by downloading the new folder and copying their ideas/ (and profile/) across.

Origin

collect merges our ki-ideenfindung (interview method for mid-sized companies, idea card) and idea-work (mode discipline, elicitation toolkit, pre-mortem). evaluate is our konzeptskizze skill and the Kriterienkatalog Konzeptbewertung v0.3 — ten fields, K.o. gates, index and confidence unchanged — moved from a one-on-one to a committee setting. See ATTRIBUTION.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.