Discovery — e11-discovery

A facilitated ideation session: you bring a topic, the skill pushes you far past the obvious — sharper questions, harder constraints, no rush to conclude. The best sessions end with you surprised at what came out.

When to use it

• Before a brief or PRFAQ, when there's a problem but no shaped idea yet.
• Naming, positioning, feature-space exploration, "what are we not seeing?" sessions.
• Not for pressure-testing one specific idea — that's e11-forge-idea. Not for critique of a draft — that's e11-refine or e11-multi-perspective.

How to invoke

Invoke e11-discovery ("help me brainstorm / ideate" also triggers it). Pick a stance for the whole session:

Stance	Who generates ideas
Facilitator	You. The skill only asks — a forcing function for your ideas.
Creative Partner	Both — you trade ideas, authorship tracked (idea by user / by coach).
Ideate for me	The skill runs the whole session autonomously and shows you the result.

The composer page

The primary way to set up a session is a local HTML composer (brain-selector.html): the skill opens it in your browser; you compose stance + technique batch from the catalog (70+ techniques across categories, with random-pick and "you choose N" options), click Copy prompt, paste back. Prefer chat? Say so and pick techniques conversationally.

The catalog itself is customizable — override brain_methods or add additional_techniques entries and the bundled brain.mjs script regenerates the composer page from your catalog.

Session mechanics

• Aim past 100 ideas; resist concluding. The skill keeps shifting creative domain every 5–10 turns and lands only when you're spent or the topic is mined out.
• One prompt per message while in dialogue — no question walls, no lazy-pick menus.
• The memlog is the session's memory. Every idea, decision, and direction appends to the session's .memlog.md (one line, in time order, via memlog.mjs). The window closing loses nothing: on next activation the skill finds sessions whose status isn't complete and offers to resume.
• Wrap-up synthesizes from the memlog — themes, standouts, and next moves (often a hand-off to e11-product-brief, e11-forge-idea, or e11-prfaq).

Headless invocation exists for machine callers (the only context where "Ideate for me" is implicit) — it follows references/headless.md and returns results instead of running a dialogue.

Gotchas

• Don't let it conclude early — and don't you either. The urge to organize at idea 25 is the enemy; the skill is built to resist it, let it.
• The stance holds. If you picked Facilitator, it will not hand you ideas, no matter how nicely you ask. Switch stance explicitly instead.
• The composer can't be verified open. The skill can't see your browser; if nothing opened, open the printed path yourself or say "let's do it in chat".

Customization

.foundry/custom/e11-discovery.toml — output_dir/folder naming, brain_methods catalog override, additional_techniques, persistent_facts. See Customization.

Source

e11-discovery/SKILL.md (with scripts/brain.mjs, the technique CSV, and the mode references)

See also: Forge idea · Multi-perspective · Phase 1.