Ideonomy — a skill for exploring an idea space
Ideas are natural phenomena. They have properties. They live along dimensions. They can be sliced, negated, recombined, and re-instantiated like any other natural object.
— after Patrick Gunkel, via Grace Kind
A pair of skills that turn any idea into a populated neighborhood of related ideas, by applying combinations of ideonomic operators — negate, substitute, combine, abstract, re-instantiate, find-the-tree — drawn from a randomized tuple at every invocation.
Every call picks a different combination of operators, organons, and dimensional prompts from a catalog of millions of distinct method-tuples. The agent doesn't get to fall back on its default brainstorming moves. That's the whole point.
The two skills share one brain (operators × organons × dimension-prompts × picker × cooldown) and differ only in how they render the artifact:
| Skill | Rendering | Best channel |
|---|
ideonomy-plain | Plain Markdown lists, fenced-code-block tables, no Unicode box-drawing. | Anywhere — including SMS bridges, Telegram, plain Slack DMs, and any context where Unicode might mangle. |
ideonomy-rich | Performative ASCII art: figlet banners, Unicode box-drawing, density gradients, visible ideonomy-machinery layers (tuple legend, dimensions surfaced, operator-named dividers, ideonomy trail). | Terminals, READMEs, blog posts with monospace code blocks, fixed-width-font emails, ttyrec sessions. |
Default to ideonomy-plain. Use ideonomy-rich when you know the medium can hold the art.
Try the rite
$ ~/.claude/skills/ideonomy-plain/bin/pick # or ideonomy-rich; same picker
=== IDEONOMY METHOD TUPLE (this invocation) ===
OPERATORS:
- abstraction-lift
- cross-domain-reinstantiation
ORGANONS:
- periodic-grid
DIMENSION-PROMPTS:
- longevity
- autonomy
- reversibility
==============================================
[…bodies of each picked method file follow, ready for the agent to apply…]
Then ask your agent to apply the tuple to your idea. What you'll get back: five or ten unfamiliar variants of the idea, organized into the picked organon, with the picked operators visible in how the agent got there. Sometimes the result is brilliant. Sometimes it's nonsense. Both are useful — the nonsense tells you which dimensions of your idea were load-bearing.
Run it ten times on the same idea. The expansions won't repeat.
The bargain
Each skill folder is fully self-contained — drop either or both into any agent's skills/ directory and they load. No installer, no symlinks, no build step.
git clone [email protected]:latentwill/ideonomy-skill.git
cp -R ideonomy-skill/ideonomy-plain <your-skills-folder>/
cp -R ideonomy-skill/ideonomy-rich <your-skills-folder>/ # optional
Common destinations:
| Agent | Skills folder |
|---|
| Claude Code | ~/.claude/skills/ |
| Cowork | ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/local-agent-mode-sessions/skills-plugin/<global-uuid>/<workspace-uuid>/skills/ |
| Anything else with a Claude-style skill loader | wherever it puts SKILL.md-based skills |
The agent picks ideonomy-plain vs ideonomy-rich automatically based on the channel — that's why both skills carry their own description. Default to ideonomy-plain if you only want one.
Pure bash + standard tools (awk, sort, find, curl only for the optional --random-org flag). ideonomy-rich additionally benefits from figlet / boxes / toilet if installed (brew install figlet boxes toilet), but always falls back to the public asciified.thelicato.io API.
Maintainer note: the operator/organon/dimension-prompt catalog and bin/pick live in ideonomy-plain/. ideonomy-rich/ carries duplicate copies so it can drop in alone — when you change a method file or the picker, update both folders. (diff -r ideonomy-plain/methods ideonomy-rich/methods to check.)
What's inside
ideonomy-skill/
├── ideonomy-plain/ ← portable rendering (default)
│ ├── SKILL.md
│ ├── bin/pick ← the chooser
│ ├── methods/ ← operators, organons, dimension-prompts
│ └── examples/
└── ideonomy-rich/ ← monospace-rich rendering
├── SKILL.md
├── bin/pick ← thin wrapper → ../ideonomy-plain/bin/pick
└── rendering/ ← per-organon ASCII recipes
(chart, tree, list, atlas, scale, cycle, dictionary)
The catalog (single source of truth):
