How do I install the Alternatives Explore skill?

Run npx skillmds@latest add yarlson/alternatives-explore in your terminal (requires Node.js), paste this page's agent-chat prompt into Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-connected agent, or download the SKILL.md file and copy it into your agent's skills directory.

Is Alternatives Explore safe to use?

This skill has not completed SkillMD's automated safety review yet. SkillMD never runs a skill's scripts for you; review the SKILL.md before installing.

Which AI agents work with Alternatives Explore?

This skill is tagged as working with Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex. SKILL.md is an open format, so most agents that read a skills directory can load it too.

Is Alternatives Explore free to use?

Yes. Installing skills from SkillMD is free, and the skill stays under its author's original license.

Who published Alternatives Explore?

yarlson (@yarlson) published this skill. Their other Agent Skills are listed on their SkillMD profile.

Alternatives Explore by yarlson — Agent Skill

Name: Alternatives Explore
Author: yarlson

Alternatives Explore

Generate and evaluate genuinely different approaches to a product, workflow, or system problem. Use when the user explicitly wants a bold, contrarian, experimental, or non-incremental alternative and a testable recommendation.

yarlson fd9d49a 1.4 KB Updated Sep 17, 2026

File contents

Alternative Ideation

Recommend one useful abstraction shift and a bounded experiment without turning ideation into architecture or implementation.

Workflow

State the core problem, current assumptions, constraints, and outcome that must remain valuable.
Generate several materially different bets by changing ownership, workflow, abstraction, distribution, architecture, or a supposedly necessary component.
Evaluate each bet for user value, distinctness, feasibility, reversibility, and testability.
Select the strongest bet and explain which default assumption it rejects, why that matters, and where it could fail.
Define the smallest experiment with bounded cost and a falsifiable success signal.

Do not produce cosmetic variants, settle final architecture, research unresolved technical facts, write an implementation plan, or implement the experiment. Use architecture-refine for architectural convergence, technical-spike for blocking technical evidence, and plan-create for implementation planning.

Finish after recommending one experiment and its success signal. A recommendation does not authorize implementation.

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