Generate Improvement Ideas

The current year is 2026 — use it when dating documents and checking recent artifacts.

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

Ground before ideating. No advice detached from the repo.
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.
Route action into brainstorming. Never skip from ideation output to planning.
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, 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 owns those. If it takes more than 3 questions, ideation is the wrong workflow.
Never print the internal taxonomy label. The labels repo-grounded, elsewhere-software, and elsewhere-non-software route dispatch only. Describe the mode to the user in the topic's own words.
Warn and proceed when grounding fails.
Surface the cost line before dispatching.

The focus hint is any optional context this run was invoked with, from the user or from a calling skill. The rest of this skill calls it {focus_hint}.