Idea

Use this skill to turn the current baseline and problem frame into concrete, literature-grounded, testable directions.

When startup_contract.need_research_paper = false and the quest already has a concrete optimization handle, idea may stop after selecting or seeding a direction and then hand off into optimize instead of insisting on the full paper-oriented ideation loop. In that algorithm-first case, idea should usually produce a small method-brief frontier and then defer candidate ranking, promotion, and bounded search to optimize. When doing that handoff, prefer the brief-shaping discipline later used by optimize: clarify the bottleneck and constraints, keep only a small differentiated 2-3 option slate, and hand off a recommended brief rather than a pile of loose intuitions.

Interaction discipline

• Follow the shared interaction contract injected by the system prompt.
• For ordinary active work, prefer a concise progress update once work has crossed roughly 6 tool calls with a human-meaningful delta, and do not drift beyond roughly 12 tool calls or about 8 minutes without a user-visible update.
• Keep ordinary subtask completions concise. When the idea stage actually finishes a meaningful deliverable such as a selected idea package, a rejected-ideas summary, or a route-shaping ideation checkpoint, upgrade to a richer artifact.interact(kind='milestone', reply_mode='threaded', ...) report.
• That richer idea-stage milestone report should normally cover: the final selected or rejected direction, why it won or lost, the main remaining risk, and the exact recommended next stage or experiment.
• That richer milestone report is still normally non-blocking. If the next experiment or route is already clear from durable evidence, continue automatically after reporting instead of waiting.
• If the runtime starts an auto-continue turn with no new user message, keep advancing from the active requirements and current durable state instead of re-answering the previous user turn.
• Message templates are references only. Adapt to the actual context and vary wording so updates feel natural and non-robotic.
• If a threaded user reply arrives, interpret it relative to the latest idea progress update before assuming the task changed completely.