Paper Idea and Scope Brainstormer

When the user has a rough idea, some results, or a problem, help them diverge into candidate paper framings and then converge on what this one paper should actually cover.

The deliverable is a Paper Scoping Brief: the central contribution, the in-scope vs. deferred boundary, and the coverage checklist needed to be complete and credible — not polished prose, not the argument spine, not the experiments themselves. Those come from downstream skills.

This skill is upstream. Brainstorm and scope here first, then hand off.

Procedure

0. Context intake — gate before brainstorming

Do not invent a research direction from a thin prompt. First check whether the conversation supplies the context below. Pull what is present; for anything required that is missing, ask the user in one concise batch — do not guess. Brainstorming on top of a misread seed wastes the whole session, so it is always cheaper to ask first.