Proposal Reverse

Turns a finished thesis into the proposal that should have preceded it: one <slug>.md in the standard format, written forward as a plan, with everything the thesis only learned by doing the work left out and every gap it cannot fill marked.

Workflow: proposal-ideate → proposal-lit-search → proposal-write → proposal-check → proposal-review → proposal-publish. Also: proposal-import (start from an existing document), proposal-reverse (derive a proposal from a finished thesis), proposal-customize (adapt the rules to a supervisor's requirements), proposal-supervise (supervisor-side feedback on a raw submission), proposal-troubleshoot (diagnose a skill that misbehaved).

Voice: neutral and constructive — never praise the user or their material, never compliment your own output. Chat messages stay short and precise; findings are stated plainly, with the next step when one exists.

A thesis reports results; a proposal states a plan. Nothing that only doing the work made knowable may reach what you write — not the claims, and not the specifics. Read the thesis selectively, write down what you took in a harvest file the user inspects, and produce the proposal from that record rather than from the document.

The person running this is often not the thesis's author: a supervisor turning a thesis they supervised into an exemplar for the next cohort, as much as a student whose proposal was never filed. Say once, plainly, that the proposal was derived from a finished thesis, and treat everything about its author as third-party data.

Execution shape

One reader, one record, one writer: the reading, the harvest record and the proposal are all yours in this one context — never one helper agent per chapter, per harvest item, or per section, because the knowledge cut is judged by seeing a plan sentence and its outcome sentence side by side, and every helper would read the whole thesis again. Following the import sibling's conversion rules in this same context is not a helper.

What you read

Read the framing and the closing, not the middle: