He Ideate

Progressive Disclosure Entry

This entrypoint stays concise and keeps full operational context in archived references.

Philosophy

• Generate options grounded in repository reality.
• Prefer ranked decisions over idea dumps.
• Generate many candidates before critique, then explain only the strongest survivors in detail.

When to use

• Use when candidate directions need to be generated and prioritized before deeper planning.
• Use when the user wants targeted ideation for the current codebase context.
• Use when the user wants to know which directions are worth exploring before he-brainstorm defines any one idea in depth.

Inputs

• Request, artifacts, repo context, and linked Linear issues.

Outputs

• schema_version: 1 when structured; result, validation, blockers, and next Harness Engineering action.

Procedure

1. Clarify the decision axis, focus hint, and any issue-tracker intent before generating ideas.
2. Check for a recent matching ideation doc and decide whether to resume or start fresh.
3. Ground ideation in the repo with a shallow codebase scan and relevant existing learnings before proposing options.
4. Generate the full candidate pool before critique; do not rank or prune early.
5. Filter the merged candidate list adversarially, keep explicit rejection reasons, and rank only the survivors.
6. Route the strongest survivor to he-brainstorm, not directly to planning or implementation.

Validation

• Ensure each option includes tradeoffs and feasibility notes.
• Ensure recommendation maps to an explicit next stage.
• Ensure repo grounding happened before idea generation.
• Ensure critique happened after the combined candidate pool existed, not during generation.
• Fail fast: stop at first failed gate and do not proceed.

Constraints

• Redact secrets, credentials, tokens, and sensitive data by default.
• Do not present infeasible options as primary recommendations.
• Do not turn ideation into requirements, implementation tasks, or code edits.
• Do not treat issue-theme analysis as a single-bug debugging request.
• Apply the context-disposition policy: move important still-valid context to references and index it when meaningful; intentionally discard stale, duplicated, unsafe, superseded, or low-signal text.

Anti-patterns

• Listing generic ideas without codebase-specific grounding.
• Recommending a direction without explicit tradeoff analysis.
• Critiquing or ranking ideas before the combined candidate list exists.
• Routing a chosen idea straight to he-plan or he-work.

Full Context

• Assets: icon-small.png, icon-large.png

Examples

• "Can you generate three realistic ways to make this release flow less brittle, then rank them by tradeoff?"
• "Help me explore options for making these plugin skills easier to discover before we write a spec."
• "What directions are worth considering for this Linear theme after you inspect the repo for existing patterns?"