idea-engine

The Idea Engine of the studio: agent skills, shipped as a Claude Code plugin.

Layout

.claude-plugin/
  plugin.json        every skill path, listed explicitly
skills/
  <category>/
    README.md        what the category is for
    <skill-name>/
      SKILL.md       the skill
      *.md           its own references and formats, flat beside it

Each skill is self-contained: the reference material and output formats it owns sit inside its own folder, not in a shared templates/ or references/ pile at the root. A skill folder is the unit you read, move, or delete.

When two skills in a category genuinely share a reference, the skill that creates the thing owns the file and the others point across at it — one source of truth, no copies.

Naming

• Skills: lowercase kebab-case, domain first — client-intake, idea-grill, idea-research, project-brief. The domain word groups a category into a readable sequence, and the frontmatter description (not the name) is what actually triggers a skill. No product- prefix: the category folder already says that.
• Sibling files: UPPERCASE-KEBAB.md. *-FORMAT.md for an output shape the skill fills in; a plain name for reference material it reads.

Categories

Category	For
product	Client pain → idea → verdict → project definition

Where artifacts go

Not here. Skills are reusable behaviour; idea and project documents are project memory with a different lifecycle. See WORKSPACE.md.

Deliberately absent

• registry.yaml — web-developmet-registry holds the catalog. A second copy here would be a stale duplicate.
• workflows/*.yaml — nothing executes YAML steps. Sequencing lives in each skill's closing section, which an agent actually reads.
• category: frontmatter — Claude Code reads name, description, allowed-tools. The folder carries the category.

Install

As a plugin, from the studio marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add stubbornweb/solo-product-studio
/plugin install idea-engine@studio

Or symlink a single skill while tuning it:

ln -s "$PWD/skills/product/idea-grill" ~/.claude/skills/idea-grill

The symlink is the better loop while a skill is still moving — edit, run it on a real idea, edit again.

Adding a skill

1. It earns a slot by failing in practice first. Write it after watching the gap, not before.
2. One folder under a category, one SKILL.md, folder name matching frontmatter name.
3. Its references and formats go beside it, not in a shared root folder.
4. Add the path to .claude-plugin/plugin.json and the row to the category README.md.