Surface Ideas

This skill takes a Resource file and surfaces candidate ideas from it, and separately flags any terms worth their own note. It does not decide which candidate is worth writing up, and it does not write the literature note or Term note itself: that's ground-claim's or ground-term's job, run separately, possibly in a different session.

0. Prerequisite: .slipbox/config.json must exist

Check first, before anything else. This skill writes rows to .slipbox/idea.db, which is only created by setup-slipbox alongside config.json.

If .slipbox/config.json is absent: stop. Do not proceed to any other step. Tell the user to run setup-slipbox first, then re-run this skill.

1. Take the Resource

Ask for the path to an already-captured Resource file: one written by clip-resource, or dropped in by an external tool such as Obsidian Web Clipper or Readwise. Either source is fine. Treat the file as frozen: read it, never edit it.

2. Surface pass

Read the Resource and surface 5-10 candidates. This is an explore pass, not an exploit pass: the goal is a spread of open questions worth discussing, not a shortlist of answers.

Each candidate is a question plus the motivation for asking it. Neither half is a conclusion. A candidate that already states what the idea means, or what follows from it, has skipped past exploration into the discussion that's supposed to happen later, in grounding. Watch for this shape and reject it: