Idea Forge
Free for noncommercial use under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; commercial use needs a licence from Rico. View the source
Idea Forge is a four-stage pipeline that runs inside whatever AI assistant the user already has. Spitball: the user talks the idea out and the AI just listens and captures. Grill: the AI sharpens it one question at a time. Map (optional): a big, foggy idea is broken into tickets. Build: the AI writes a single self-contained HTML idea page in the user's own branding. Session state is saved as the user goes, so a dropped session resumes from its folder. A portable "idea brief" carries an idea between sessions or apps.
The problem
Ideas get lost between a voice memo and a finished write-up, and the tools that help are usually tied to one AI vendor. Version 1 of this kit shipped three hand-maintained copies for different apps (pre-built zips, a ChatGPT port, an install script). When one app changed what it accepted, the user had to repackage by hand. Version 2 ships one canonical package and lets the receiving AI adapt it.
How it works
The kit is folders of markdown: six skills, each a SKILL.md with optional workflows/ and references/. A self-adapting installer.md tells the receiving AI how to install itself on its own platform. A coding agent copies the skill folders into its skills directory. The Claude app builds the six skill zips itself and hands them back with upload steps. ChatGPT Projects and Gemini Gems condense the skills into project instructions. Plain chat loads the pipeline for one conversation. Config (USER-CONFIG.md) and branding (branding/brand.md, branding/image-setup.md) live in one canonical place inside the installed idea-forge/ folder. The determinism-first rule: a script owns mechanical checks wherever one can run. Here scripts/verify-install.mjs checks the installed shape and fails closed on any missing nested file.
Features
- Six skills
- One package, every harness
- Session persistence
- Idea brief
- Branding interview
- Image handling without extra tooling
- Pasted content is data
- Own-data refusal
- Positioning guard
- Version-aware upgrade
- Illustrated guide
How it was built
Version 1 shipped the same skills three ways, for the Claude app, ChatGPT and an install script, and each copy was maintained by hand.
Version 2 on 2026-07-15 deleted every parallel copy. One skills source and an installer that the receiving AI reads and follows replaced them, so each app adapts the package itself.
An OpenAI model review and a kit-test swarm fed into the same release: exact file lists for capped plans, an image-generation test before relying on it, and one merged config file.
When the kit line was audited on 2026-08-11, Idea Forge was one of the two kits real users had validated, and its traits became criteria for every other kit.
The 2026-08-13 hardening, written with Claude, replaced trust in the AI's word with a Node install verifier and made the install stop without a real idea. Rico kept the person's own idea at the center of every run.
Credits
grilling, grill-me and wayfinder are adapted from Matt Pocock's skills (github.com/mattpocock/skills, MIT). That licence is preserved in skills/wayfinder/LICENSE.upstream and covers the adapted portions only.