Why "Give Me Ideas About X" Does Not Work
Open ideation prompts produce the most commonly suggested ideas for the most general version of your topic -- which are the ideas everyone else is already using. Open prompts produce average ideas. Constrained prompts produce specific ones.
The more you narrow the parameters, the more original Claude's suggestions become. This is counter-intuitive but consistently true.
The most powerful constraint: tell Claude what has already been tried and what does not work. "Generate content ideas about AI for founders -- but not tutorials, not tool lists, not productivity tips. Those are oversaturated. I need angles that have not been done." This produces completely different suggestions than any open prompt.
Constraints That Produce Original Ideas
The negative constraint: Specify what has already been done in your space and explicitly exclude it. The remaining space is where original ideas live.
The audience-specific constraint: Instead of "ideas for founders," try "ideas for a marketer at a mid-size company who is skeptical of AI and has to justify the cost to her CFO." The more specific the person, the more specific the ideas.
The assumption-challenge constraint: "Generate ideas that challenge the assumption that [common assumption in your space]." Contrarian ideas are almost always original by definition.
The Most Underused Ideation Prompt
"What question should I be asking about [topic] that nobody in my space is currently asking?" This produces meta-level ideas -- the framing itself is the idea -- and is consistently more original than any direct ideation prompt.