generative-thinking
Break out of a locked problem frame by picking one disciplined generative move — reframe, provocation (Po), random stimulus, SCAMPER, inversion, structured analogy, constraint play, or family traversal — and committing to it before evaluating.
The skill is the interrupt for fixation, not a brainstorming workshop. Pick one move matched to the diagnosis, run it, over-generate and tail-sift (write next to each candidate the probability the old frame would have reached it; drop the likely ones), apply the fire test (could this output have been produced without the move?), stop.
See SKILL.md for the diagnostic table, per-technique recipes with success signals, LLM-specific sourcing notes, and canonical references. references/stimulus-vocabulary.md is a 128-noun deck for the hashed random stimulus.
Provenance
- Lateral thinking, Po, random stimulus — Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking (1970), Serious Creativity (1992)
- SCAMPER — Bob Eberle (1971), built on Alex Osborn's Applied Imagination (1953)
- Oblique Strategies — Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt (1974–2001)
- Functional fixedness (the bias this skill counters) — Karl Duncker (1935/1945); candle problem
- LLM-specific design fixation — Wadinambiarachchi et al., CHI 2024 (doi:10.1145/3613904.3642919): AI-generated examples during ideation increase fixation and reduce fluency, variety, originality vs. no-support baseline. Motivates the LLM-sourcing section.
- Family traversal — Balestriero, Pesenti & LeCun, arXiv:2110.09485 (interior ≠ novelty; limits extrapolate, mixtures average)
- Tail sift (typicality bias, verbalized-probability prompting) — Jiayi Zhang, Simon Yu, Derek Chong, Anthony Sicilia, Michael R. Tomz, Christopher D. Manning & Weiyan Shi, Verbalized Sampling, arXiv:2510.01171
- Hashed internal random stimulus — Kou Misaki & Takuya Akiba (Sakana AI), String Seed of Thought, arXiv:2510.21150
- Structured analogy — Andrew Shen, Shaul Druckmann & James Zou (Stanford), Unlocking LLM Creativity in Science through Analogical Reasoning, arXiv:2605.11258, built on Dedre Gentner's structure-mapping theory (Cognitive Science, 1983)
The three 2025–2026 papers were pointed out by Stuart Gray; 0.3.0 is the result.
Complements
- challenging — evaluates after generation
- convening-experts — synthesizes multiple role-based viewpoints
- tiling-tree — exhaustive MECE partitioning of a solution space
This skill generates distance, not judgment, coverage, or consensus.