Worst Idea

by danium

Worst Idea is a Writing skill for Claude Code, published by danium in lateral-thinking.

216 stars14 forkson danium/lateral-thinkingAdded 2026/08/11+88% in starsRepository updated 2026/07/09

View source on GitHub Download repo ZIP

agent-skillsbrainstormingclaude-codecodexcreativitylateral-thinking

Install in seconds

Install Worst Idea

Copy Worst Idea into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinking/tree/main/skills/worst-idea ~/.claude/skills/worst-idea

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinking.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/worst-idea/SKILL.md in danium/lateral-thinking
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/worst-idea
Collection: One of 9 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: Writing — 1012 skills

What Worst Idea does

Use the Worst Possible Idea technique to break out of safe, timid thinking by designing terrible solutions, identifying the underlying bad mechanisms, and inverting them into strong features. Ideal for when your team is optimizing rather than imagining.

Worst Idea is cataloged under Writing on DirSkills. Worst Idea comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, brainstorming, claude-code, codex and creativity.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Worst Possible Idea

What this technique does

Ask for the worst solution to the problem, not the best. Design solutions that would reliably make things terrible, then dissect each one to find the exact mechanism that makes it bad. Invert that mechanism, and you have a feature. The move works because "what's the best design?" routes through everyone's inhibitions and lands on the safe, obvious answer, whereas "how would we guarantee failure?" removes the fear of being wrong and lets people say things out loud — and every named failure mode is a design principle wearing its opposite.

Source: reverse brainstorming, attributed to Hotpoint's product development practice in the 1950s, and standard in the d.school/IDEO facilitation toolkit as "Worst Possible Idea."

Workflow

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Worst Idea

What else does danium publish alongside Worst Idea?
Worst Idea is one of 9 skills that DirSkills catalogs from danium/lateral-thinking, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Assumption Inversion, Concept Fan and Forced Analogy. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Worst Idea does, and is maintained by danium in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the danium/lateral-thinking page.
How does Worst Idea compare to other Writing skills?
Worst Idea ranks #839 by stars among the 1012 Writing skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Article Writing, Social Media Content Calendar and Knowledge Comic Creator. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Worst Idea against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.