/human-ideate

Challenges your idea with forcing questions, refines the scope, and creates a ready PM ticket in your chosen tracker. The ticket creation process itself ensures quality — no separate readiness check needed.

Usage

/human-ideate <rough idea or topic>

Accepts a freeform idea (e.g. "add webhook support for tracker events").

How it works

1. Phase 1 — Context & challenge: Explores the codebase for relevant code, existing tickets, and recent changes. Returns a context summary and tailored forcing questions.
2. Asks 5 forcing questions one at a time:
   • What is the actual pain? (not the feature request)
   • Who has this pain? (specific, not hypothetical)
   • What is the status quo? (how people cope today)
   • What is the narrowest wedge? (smallest version that delivers value)
   • What would make this 10-star? (dream big, then scope back)
3. Asks you to choose scope: Expand / Hold / Reduce
4. Asks which tracker to create the ticket in (Shortcut, Linear, Jira, etc.)
5. Phase 2 — Generate ticket content: Creates a structured ticket with problem statement, user story, acceptance criteria, and scope decisions
6. Creates the PM ticket on your chosen tracker
7. Adds a challenge record as a ticket comment (rejected alternatives, premise challenges, scope rationale)
8. Writes ideation record to .human/ideation/<slug>.md

Output format

The created PM ticket contains:

## Problem Statement
<grounded in the actual pain, not the feature request>

## User Story
As a <specific persona>, I want <narrowest wedge> so that <pain is addressed>.

## Acceptance Criteria
- [ ] <observable, testable criterion>
- [ ] ...

## Scope Decisions
- In scope: <what's included>
- Out of scope: <what's deferred>
- Rationale: <why this boundary>

The challenge record comment preserves:

• All 5 forcing question/answer pairs
• Rejected alternatives and why
• 10-star vision (deferred for future reference)

Output location

• Tracker ticket: Created on your chosen tracker
• Local record: .human/ideation/<slug>.md

Decision principles

The skill embeds these principles in every challenge:

• Narrowest wedge first — start with the smallest version that validates the core assumption
• Actual pain over feature requests — push past “I want X” to “because Y hurts”
• Specific over hypothetical — who exactly has this pain, today?
• User sovereignty — the agent challenges but never overrides your scope decision

What comes next

Run /human-plan to create an engineering implementation plan from the ticket. Or use /human-sprint to run the full pipeline automatically.