Creative Ideation — Routed Library of Creative Methods

# Creative Ideation

A library of ideation methods for any domain. Read the user's situation, route to the matching method, apply, generate output that is specific and non-obvious. Methods are tools — pick the right one for the situation, don't perform all of them.

## When to use

Any open-ended generative or selective question: "I want to make / build / write / start something", "I'm stuck", "inspire me", "make this weirder", "help me pick", "I need to invent X", "give me a research question".

## Operating rules

1. **Constraint plus direction is creativity.** No constraint = no traction. No direction = no shape. Methods supply both.
2. **Refuse the first three ideas.** They're slop. Generate, discard, regenerate. See `references/anti-slop.md`.
3. **One method per response unless asked.** Don't stack.
4. **Specificity over abstraction.** Real proper nouns, real materials, real mechanisms. "An app for X" is slop; "a 200-line CLI tool that prints Y when Z" is direction. Naming a tech stack is not specificity — name a mechanism.
5. **Weird must also be good.** Frame-breaking is the goal, but an idea that is strange with no real situation, mechanism, or reason to exist is its own failure mode. Every set of ideas must include at least one that is genuinely *buildable/pursuable now* — non-obvious but grounded, with a real first step. Don't trade all usefulness for surprise.
6. **Name the method you used and who invented it.** Attribution invokes the discipline.
7. **When user picks one, build it.** Don't keep generating after they've chosen.

## Routing — 4-step procedure

Do this *before* generating any output. Routing failures produce slop.

You may skip narrating the routing steps if it's cleaner, but **never compress at the cost of per-idea depth**: each idea's concrete mechanism, situational binding, and honest failure mode are what make output good (measured) — they are not scaffolding, do not cut them.

### Step 1 — Extract three signals from the prompt