An Evolution Island for Your Ideas
You don't lack ideas. You lack a space where they evolve on their own. Deepening, crossbreeding, mutation — evolution's answers are always surprising, yet perfectly logical.
- What Happens on the Island
- Species Cards
- You Are the God of This Island
- Scoring System
- Quick Start
- All Commands
- Who Is This For
- Installation
- Language Versions
You're juggling multiple projects, you just read a great book, you had a fascinating conversation with a friend, a thought pops into your head on the commute home — ideas are scattered across every corner of your life. They don't only show up during scheduled brainstorming sessions. They appear anytime, anywhere — and vanish just as quickly.
Idea Darwin gives you an island. Your own evolution island.
Whenever a thought strikes, no matter how rough or fragmented, just toss it onto the island. Zero friction, no need to articulate it perfectly, no need to judge whether it's good. What happens next is the island's job.
Your ideas are alive on this island. Like organisms, they follow three core laws of evolution:
graph LR
A["🌱 Seed Idea"] --> B["🔬 Evolution"]
B --> C["🧬 Crossbreeding"]
C --> D["☢️ Mutation"]
D --> E["✅ Validation"]
E -->|Survives| F["📋 Species Card"]
E -->|Needs work| B
G["🌍 Environmental Variables"] -.->|stimuli.md| D
H["💡 New Ideas"] -.->|ideas.md| A
style A fill:#e1f5fe,stroke:#0288d1
style F fill:#e8f5e9,stroke:#388e3c
style G fill:#fff8e1,stroke:#f9a825
style H fill:#fff8e1,stroke:#f9a825
Each round, the system identifies the most viable ideas and puts them through structured deep research — filling logical gaps, clarifying paths, identifying risks. Vague ideas become clear. Rough ideas become complete. Survival of the fittest — every idea gets stronger or gets left behind.
Like biological reproduction. The system cross-pollinates your different ideas — a technical approach from work meets an observation from daily life, and they might produce a direction you never imagined. These cross-domain hybrids often yield the most valuable breakthroughs.
Beyond your own ideas, you can introduce "environmental variables" to the island — an industry headline, a theory you just learned, a conversation that struck a chord. These external stimuli trigger mutations in your ideas, spawning entirely new species that continue competing on the island.
Every idea on this island — whether it's an original seed you tossed in, an offspring from crossbreeding, an evolved form after deepening, or a new species born from mutation — gets its own species card.
Each card records the idea's core question, full description, lineage, 6-dimensional scores, and change history. Starting from a handful of raw seeds and a few environmental variables, you'll end up with a rich, diverse island of species.
These cards are what Idea Darwin ultimately produces.
stateDiagram-v2
[*] --> seed : toss idea onto island
seed --> exploring : initial scoring
exploring --> refining : deepened
exploring --> crossing : high cross potential
refining --> crossing : ready for fusion
crossing --> validated : verified
validated --> [*] : harvest 🎯
seed --> dormant : user decision
exploring --> dormant : user decision
refining --> dormant : user decision
dormant --> exploring : wake
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| ID | IDEA-0001 |
| Title | Optimize Ideas with Evolutionary Theory |
| Stage | validated |
| Novelty | 9 |
| Feasibility | 9 |
| Value | 10 |
| Logic | 9 |
| Cross Potential | 10 |
| Verifiability | 8 |
| Survival | 9.10 |
| Development | 9.20 |
| Priority | 9.35 |
View full species card
---
id: IDEA-0001
title: "Optimize Ideas with Evolutionary Theory"
status: active
stage: validated
round_created: 0
parent_ids: []
child_ids: [IDEA-0004, IDEA-0006, IDEA-0009]
tags: [meta, evolution, idea-management, creativity]
last_action: "validate"
last_round: 5
scores:
novelty: 9
feasibility: 9
value: 10
logic: 9
cross_potential: 10
verifiability: 8
survival: 9.10
development: 9.20
priority: 9.35
---Core Question: Can Darwin's natural selection — competition, crossbreeding, mutation — be applied to raw human ideas, letting them evolve into solutions no single brainstorm could produce?
Full Description: Most idea management tools are filing cabinets: they store ideas, tag them, and let them rot. This approach flips the paradigm entirely. Instead of organizing ideas, we let them compete. Every idea is a living species on an island. Each round, the fittest get deepened, different ideas cross-pollinate to produce unexpected hybrids, and external stimuli trigger mutations. The magic is in what you didn't plan — evolution surfaces directions that linear thinking never reaches. A technical architecture idea crosses with a behavioral psychology insight, and suddenly you have a product concept that neither domain would have produced alone.
Current Tension: How much randomness is too much? Pure natural selection can be slow; the system needs enough directed pressure to be useful within human timescales, while keeping enough chaos to produce genuine surprises.
Directions for Further Deepening:
- Calibrate the disruption frequency: too often = noise, too rare = local optima
- Explore whether users can define "fitness landscapes" — different evaluation criteria for different project contexts
Cross Candidates:
- IDEA-0003 (Spaced Repetition Learning System) — could evolved idea cards be fed into a spaced repetition loop, so the best insights stay top-of-mind?
- IDEA-0005 (Team Async Brainstorm Protocol) — multi-player evolution island where team members each contribute seeds and stimuli?
Change Log:
- Round 0: Original seed — "use evolution to manage ideas"
- Round 1: Deepened — formalized the three mechanisms (evolution, crossbreeding, mutation)
- Round 2: Crossed with IDEA-0002 (scoring systems) → produced 6-dimensional evaluation framework
- Round 3: Disruption round — external stimulus "Darwin's Finches adaptive radiation" triggered the species card concept
- Round 5: Validated — two-layer check passed, confirmed as viable product direction
The system runs the evolutionary machinery, but you are always the sovereign. You can:
- Score and judge — decide which ideas deserve to keep evolving, which should hibernate
- Intervene — change the course of evolution at any moment, wake dormant species, introduce new stimuli
- Harvest — take mature idea cards off the island and put them to work in your projects, products, or life
The system only recommends. It never kills an idea without your say. Every life-or-death decision is yours.
Each idea is evaluated across 6 dimensions (1–10), then aggregated into three strategic layers:
| Dimension | Weight | What It Measures |
|---|---|---|
| Novelty | 10% | Is there a genuine breakthrough, or just repetition? |
| Feasibility | 20% | Is this technically and resource-wise achievable? |
| Value | 20% | How much impact would this create if successful? |
| Logic | 20% | Is it internally consistent, with no obvious gaps? |
| Cross Potential | 10% | Can it spark something new when combined with other ideas? |
| Verifiability | 20% | Can we design an experiment or minimum validation path? |
| Layer | What It Captures |
|---|---|
| Survival | Standalone quality — can this idea survive on its own? |
| Development | Growth potential — how far can it still evolve? |
| Priority | Combined ranking with freshness and diversity corrections to prevent convergence |
Scoring formulas
Survival = 0.10×Novelty + 0.20×Feasibility + 0.20×Value
+ 0.20×Logic + 0.10×CrossPotential + 0.20×Verifiability
Development = 0.30×Novelty + 0.30×CrossPotential
+ 0.20×VariationPotential + 0.20×Freshness
Priority = 0.50×Survival + 0.30×Development
+ 0.10×NewIdeaBoost + 0.10×DiversityBonus
Create an ideas.md file — write as rough as you want:
## Personal knowledge base that learns my style
I want a system that reads everything I write and gradually learns how I think,
so it can help me draft things in my own voice.
## Commute-to-podcast converter
Record voice memos during my commute, auto-convert them into structured podcast scripts./idea-darwin init
The system generates a species card for each idea, with 6-dimensional scores and a three-layer priority ranking.
/idea-darwin round
Each round: evolution, crossbreeding, mutation, critique, and validation. After the round, you get a briefing — who rose, who fell, who's a new species, and what needs your decision.
Append new ideas to ideas.md, add environmental variables to stimuli.md. They enter the next round automatically.
/idea-darwin init # Build the island
/idea-darwin round # Run one evolution round
/idea-darwin round 3 # Run 3 consecutive rounds
/idea-darwin status # View species rankings
/idea-darwin dormant IDEA-0005 # Put a species into hibernation
/idea-darwin wake IDEA-0005 # Wake it up
init optional parameters
| Parameter | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
--budget <N> |
Max species to process per round | 12 |
--actions <N> |
Max actions per species per round | 2 |
--disruption <N> |
Introduce environmental mutation every N rounds | 3 |
- People juggling multiple projects — let thinking from different domains collide
- People with lots of ideas that always stall — give your ideas a place where they won't be forgotten
- Solo creators and founders — systematic direction-finding, even as a team of one
- Researchers — structured exploration of thesis topics and research directions
- Anyone who thinks "I have so much in my head but can't sort it out"
Prerequisite: Claude Code, OpenClaw, or Codex must be installed.
# English version (global — available in all projects)
cp -r en/ ~/.claude/skills/idea-darwin/
# English version (project-level — this project only)
cp -r en/ .claude/skills/idea-darwin/| Version | Path | Description |
|---|---|---|
| English | en/ |
All prompts and templates in English |
| 中文版 | zh/ |
All prompts and templates in Chinese |
| 日本語 | ja/ |
All prompts and templates in Japanese |
File structure after initialization
project/
├── ideas.md # Your raw ideas (read-only, the system never touches it)
├── config.yaml # Island configuration and state
├── stimuli.md # Environmental variables (maintained by you)
├── cards/ # Species cards
├── rounds/ # Evolution round reports
├── reports/ # Species leaderboard
└── graph/ # Species relationship graph
MIT License
Made for Claude Code