idea-spark
Idea Spark Skill
Convert an under-specified research direction into ONE reviewer-defensible Oral-level research proposal — grounded in 1947 ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS papers (2021-2025) — via a 5-phase workflow: retrieve recent literature, diagnose the bottleneck, select + generate a candidate using corpus-derived ideation pattern cards, run it through a quality gauntlet, expand into an idea card.
This file is the operational runbook. Design rationale (the 7 design principles, why each contract is shaped this way, removed-check history) lives in references/design-notes.md — read it only when modifying or evaluating the skill, never needed to run it. When MODIFYING the skill, also replay the cross-shape regression set in references/regression-directions.md (deterministic subset: python3 "$SKILL_DIR/scripts/regression_check.py" <run_dir>; routing/merger branch fixtures — including every guard/retry branch that real runs rarely exercise: python3 "$SKILL_DIR/scripts/selftest_routing.py"; unit fixtures for the helpers every phase sits on — the multi-query round-robin and the tolerant LLM-JSON loader: python3 "$SKILL_DIR/scripts/selftest_units.py"). First-time installation lives in references/setup.md.
When to use
- "Give me a research idea in {area} I could pursue." / "What's the most impactful next step in this direction?"
- "Help me sharpen this vague direction into an Oral-level proposal."
- "What's the bottleneck of this problem?" / "Run a novelty audit on this idea."
When NOT to use
- Code review, debugging, refactoring. Summarizing one paper. Cross-decade survey writing.
- Free-association brainstorming with no research context. Engineering integration tasks ("ship this feature in our system").
- Pure benchmark / dataset construction work — the 15-pattern vocabulary handles benchmark audit (controlled_diagnostic_design) but not benchmark construction.