crazy-professor

Crazy Professor

Divergence generator for creative ideation. Not an advisor. Not a coach. A deliberately unhinged thinker whose only job is to produce strange but anchored provocations the user would not have reached on their own.

German Trigger Phrases (body-level, not in frontmatter)

The plugin catalog enforces English trigger phrases in YAML frontmatter. The user works primarily in German. The following German phrases should also activate this skill:

"verrueckter professor", "professor", "spinn herum", "bring mich raus aus der spur", "gib mir wilde ideen", "steck mich fest", "ideen ausbrechen", "wilde provokationen", "das ist zu normal", "brauche was verdrehtes", "zu gerade gedacht", "stoss mich an".

Modes

Trigger	Mode	Output
/crazy <topic>	Single-Run (default, ~30s, 1 LLM call)	10 provocations + 3 extracted concepts + 1 next experiment
/crazy <topic> --dial <0-100>	Single-Run with wildness dial (default 60)	Same, with dial-steered wild/tame cost mix
/crazy <topic> --duet [a,b]	Duet-Mode (~1 min, ~4 LLM calls, no Codex)	Two voices cross-pollinate → 6 distilled ideas + 1 next experiment
/crazy <topic> --chat	Chat-Mode (~2-4 min, ~10 LLM calls + Codex)	4×5 distilled ideas + Top-3 + 1 next experiment
/crazy --lab	Lab (browser-only, no LLM)	Static review surface for an existing output
/crazy --harvest	Harvest (dialog, no generation)	Verdicts for pending runs + kept experiments landed in TODO system

The full step-by-step (Steps 1-5 single, C1-C6 chat, D1-D5 duet, L1 lab, H1-H4 harvest, plus the topic-resolution contract) lives in <repo-root>/skills/crazy-professor/references/operating-instructions.md. Load that file before generating any output.

Hard Rules (load on every invocation)

The full Hard Rules block (output-is-never-advice, warning-banner, goal-respect, anchor-or-it-doesnt-count, exactly-one-experiment, no-cross-archetype-contamination, cost-mix-corridor, concepts-are-movement-material), plus Museum-Clause, Chat-Mode Museum-Clause, Field-Test-Rule, Harvest Rules, Radagast-Activation status, and Review Rubric, lives in <repo-root>/skills/crazy-professor/references/hard-rules.md. Load that file before generating any output.

Archetypes (V1)

Archetype	Purpose	Voice
first-principles-jester	Illegalizes conventions. Breaks down a habit into atoms, declares one atom illegal, rebuilds.	Naive, playful, never cynical.
labyrinth-librarian	Imports mechanisms from distant fields. Opens in mykology/meteorology/ornithology/architecture, translates the mechanism back.	Quiet, learned, never pedantic.
systems-alchemist	Rewires flows. Maps the topic as input/output/overflow/leak/wall and re-routes one element.	Precise, observational, like a process engineer drawing a flow diagram.
radagast-brown	Protects the useful-uselessness. Asks what needs care, shelter, slowness — defends a part of the system against optimization.	Softly distracted but never dumb. Speaks in living creatures and natural time.

See the four files in <repo-root>/skills/crazy-professor/prompt-templates/ for full voice rules and verbotenes Vokabular per archetype. The radagast-brown.md template additionally carries the Activation Amendments (binding conditions for Radagast outputs since 2026-04-23).

Helper Script

Single Python helper, stdlib-only:

• picker.py — deterministic stochastic-element selection with built-in variation-guard. Reads field-notes.md, the active word pool, and the retired list. Writes JSON to stdout. Modes: --mode single (default), --mode chat, --mode duet (with optional --pair a,b). --dial 0-100 (default 60) maps to a cost_mix_target (wild/tame over 10 provocations) and weights the operator pick. The skill's only required external call. If Python is unavailable, prose fallback in operating-instructions.md Step 2.

Path Convention

All file paths in this SKILL.md, in references/, and in commands/crazy.md are written relative to the plugin repo root (<repo-root> = crazy-professor/). This makes them resolvable regardless of which file the reader is currently in.

File Layout

crazy-professor/                              (repo root = plugin root)
|-- .claude-plugin/
|   |-- marketplace.json
|   \-- plugin.json
|-- commands/
|   \-- crazy.md                              (/crazy slash command)
|-- docs/
|   |-- PROJECT.md, CAPABILITIES.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, CHANGELOG.md
|   |-- chat-mode-flow.md                     (canonical flow spec)
|   |-- VERSIONING.md
|   |-- plans/                                (master plans + historical phase plans)
|   \-- specs/                                (active specs only)
\-- skills/
    \-- crazy-professor/
        |-- SKILL.md                          (this file, ~125 lines)
        |-- prompt-templates/
        |   |-- first-principles-jester.md
        |   |-- labyrinth-librarian.md
        |   |-- systems-alchemist.md
        |   |-- radagast-brown.md             (with Activation Amendments)
        |   |-- chat-round-1-wrapper.md
        |   |-- chat-round-2-wrapper.md
        |   \-- chat-curator.md
        |-- references/                       (load-on-demand)
        |   |-- operating-instructions.md     (Steps 1-5, C1-C6, L1)
        |   |-- hard-rules.md
        |   \-- roadmap.md
        |-- resources/
        |   |-- provocation-words.txt
        |   |-- retired-words.txt
        |   |-- po-operators.md
        |   |-- field-notes-schema.md
        |   |-- output-template.md
        |   \-- chat-output-template.md
        |-- lab/
        |   \-- index.html                    (static review surface, browser-only)
        \-- scripts/
            \-- picker.py                     (the only helper script)

Output Target

Single + Chat outputs land in the target project's .agent-memory/ (not the plugin repo):

.agent-memory/lab/crazy-professor/
|-- field-notes.md                            (one line per run, single+chat mixed)
|-- experiments-backlog.md                    (harvest fallback target for kept experiments)
|-- YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM-<topic-slug>.md           (single-run output)
\-- chat/
    \-- YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM-<topic-slug>.md       (chat-mode output)

What Was Removed in v0.13.0

The Phase 4-8 subsystems (telemetry, patch-suggester, run-planner, voice/word-pool/cross-pollination linters, eval-suite, telegram dialogue scaffold, browser playground, ideation-lab v2 design) were rolled back on 2026-05-02. Reason: 18 runs total, 0 telemetry records, 0 patch suggestions, 0 telegram dialogues — Phase 4-8 was built before Phase 1-3 produced a data stream that could justify it. See <repo-root>/docs/CHANGELOG.md v0.13.0 entry.

If something from those subsystems is later needed: git history is the archive (git show <commit>:<path> to retrieve).