Ideas Lifecycle

The ideas lifecycle is intentionally lightweight compared to the project workflow.

Levels

Ideas can be stored at two levels:

• Project level (default) — .oat/ideas/ in the current project, gitignored
• User level (global) — ~/.oat/ideas/ in the home directory, for ideas not tied to a specific project

All idea skills accept a --global flag to operate at user level. Without the flag, skills auto-detect the level by checking for an active idea pointer or existing ideas directory at each level.

Each level has its own independent backlog, scratchpad, and active-idea config value.

Flow

1. Quick capture: oat-idea-scratchpad to review or capture idea seeds
2. Start brainstorming: oat-idea-new (scaffolds directory, then invokes oat-idea-ideate)
3. Resume brainstorming: oat-idea-ideate (multiple sessions over time)
4. Finalize: oat-idea-summarize (generates summary, updates backlog)

Directory structure

# Project level
.oat/ideas/
├── backlog.md              # Aggregated list of all ideas
├── scratchpad.md           # Quick-capture pad for idea seeds
└── {idea-name}/
    ├── discovery.md        # Brainstorming document
    └── summary.md          # Generated when finalized

# User level (global) — same structure
~/.oat/ideas/
├── backlog.md
├── scratchpad.md
└── {idea-name}/
    ├── discovery.md
    └── summary.md

State model

Ideas track two states in discovery.md frontmatter:

• brainstorming — actively being explored
• summarized — finalized with a summary document

No state.md per idea. No HiLL gates. No knowledge base dependency.

Active idea

Each level stores the active idea in its config file:

• Project level: activeIdea in .oat/config.local.json (gitignored)
• User level: activeIdea in ~/.oat/config.json

Read/write via CLI: oat config get activeIdea / oat config set activeIdea <path>.

Ideas and projects use separate config keys and do not interfere with each other.

Scratchpad

The scratchpad is a checklist for capturing idea seeds quickly. Each entry supports nested bullets for quick notes:

- [ ] **{idea name}** - {brief summary} _(YYYY-MM-DD)_
  - {quick note}
  - {another note}

Use oat-idea-scratchpad to review entries or quick-capture new ones. When oat-idea-ideate runs without an active idea, it also shows scratchpad entries alongside existing ideas. Selecting a scratchpad entry scaffolds the idea inline.

Backlog

The backlog (backlog.md) aggregates all ideas in three sections:

• Active Brainstorming — ideas currently being explored
• Captured Ideas — summarized and ready for future consideration
• Archived — completed, abandoned, or promoted to projects

Promotion to project

To promote a summarized idea to a Spec-Driven OAT project:

1. Run the oat-project-new skill with the idea name to scaffold the project
2. Run the oat-project-discover skill and use the idea's summary.md as the initial request
3. Update the ideas backlog entry to Archived with reason: promoted to project

Initialization

The ideas directory is created automatically by oat-idea-new or oat-idea-scratchpad on first use. Future: oat init ideas will scaffold the directory and copy idea skills into the project.

Reference artifacts

• {IDEAS_ROOT}/backlog.md
• {IDEAS_ROOT}/scratchpad.md
• {IDEAS_ROOT}/{idea-name}/discovery.md
• {IDEAS_ROOT}/{idea-name}/summary.md
• .oat/templates/ideas/