lateral-thinking

Your product isn't out of ideas. It's stuck in the obvious ones.

Give your AI coding agent eight structured ways to find a better product direction — not just another feature to ship. A router diagnoses how you're stuck and picks the right move.

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The demo

Same agent. Same prompt. One of them read a skill first.

Prompt: "Our users create one project, then never return. What product direction would make that first project worth coming back to?"

Onboarding checklist Give them three next steps after project creation.

Weekly email summary Remind them what changed and invite them back.

Personalized dashboard Make the home screen more useful after the first project.

(Three sensible features. One idea: ask the user to remember the product.)

🗼 The lighthouse beam It does not light the whole sea. It sends a precise signal when navigation matters.

→ A return trigger should be caused by the user's project, not by a generic reminder.

Beacon — when a project reaches a date, risk, or decision the user chose at creation, send one concise signal explaining why it needs attention now.

🍞 The sourdough starter It becomes more useful between visits. Small inputs create a living thing worth checking on.

→ A first project should begin a rhythm, not become a static container.

Pulse — turn the first project into a lightweight weekly brief: what changed, what is blocked, and the one decision that would move it forward.

🎡 The Ferris wheel — it repeats a visible loop, but the force-fit only produced a prettier recurring dashboard. Abandoned.

The vanilla answer isn't bad. It's good — and every feature asks the user to do more work or remember to return. Three features, one idea.

The technique produced different product directions: a project that signals at the right moment, and a project that gets more useful between visits. The meta-pattern is the point: retention is not a reminder problem. It is a new-signal problem. Give people a reason to return that did not exist when they left.

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Install

Any agent (recommended):

npx skills add danium/lateral-thinking

Claude Code (plugin):

/plugin marketplace add danium/lateral-thinking
/plugin install lateral-thinking@lateral-thinking

Codex: ask $skill-installer to install from https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinking

Manual: clone and copy skills/* into your agent's skills directory.

The toolkit installs as one bundle — the lateral router needs its sibling techniques.

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Pick your technique