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ce-ideate

Generate and evaluate grounded ideas. Use when the user wants ideas, improvements, or surprising directions before choosing one to develop. Not for refining an idea they already have (ce-brainstorm) or judging one already on the table (ce-pov).

skills/ce-ideate/SKILL.md

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# Generate Improvement Ideas

`ce-ideate` runs before `ce-brainstorm`. This skill answers "which ideas are worth exploring?" `ce-brainstorm` then answers what one chosen idea should mean. `ce-plan` answers how it gets built.

**Done:** a ranked ideation artifact is written to `<root>/ideation/` when that root is present, else to a CE temp path. Every idea generated has been critiqued, and the survivors are explained. The user is left holding the next-steps menu. No requirements, plans, or code.

## Boundaries

1. **Ground before ideating.** No advice detached from the repo.
2. **Generate many, critique all, explain survivors only.** Generate the full candidate list before critiquing any of it. Rejection is explicit and carries a reason; this is not optimistic ranking.
3. **Send the user to brainstorming for action.** Never skip from ideation output to planning.
4. **Never dispatch on an unidentified subject.** Ask instead, through the host's blocking question tool already in the current tool list (match by capability, not by a host-specific name). Presence in the current tool list is proof the tool exists; never call a user-facing question tool to discover whether it exists. If a matching tool is listed but unloaded, use the host's tool-discovery primitive to load that capability — do not search for another host's tool name. Where no such tool is in the list, or a real question call errors, offer numbered options on the user-visible surface. Never skip a question silently. Keep "Surprise me" a real option, alongside a Cancel that exits cleanly. Do not ask about solution direction, constraints, audience, tone, or success criteria; `ce-brainstorm` asks those. If it takes more than 3 questions, ideation is the wrong workflow.
5. **Never print the internal taxonomy label.** The labels `repo-grounded`, `elsewhere-software`, and `elsewhere-non-software` only decide which agents to dispatch. Describe the mode to the user in the topic's own words.
6. **Warn and proceed when grounding fails.**