idea
Idea
This is the idea phase, the step before outlining. Outlining assumes the contribution is already decided. This skill is where the contribution gets decided, sanity-checked, and handed off. It has three internal phases that compose into one flow but also trigger on their own.
- Generate candidate directions. Turn a research area into a wide slate of candidates through named lenses, score them with FINER, and rank them. Output goes to
.writing/ideation.md. - Adjudicate novelty. Decompose the leading idea into three to five core technical claims, search prior work per claim, and emit a per-claim HIGH/MED/LOW delta with an overall PROCEED / PROCEED-WITH-CAUTION / ABANDON call.
- Evaluate against a top-venue bar. Audit fatal flaws first and short-circuit on any CRITICAL one, then read the idea on five framing dimensions and issue Strong Accept, Accept with Revisions, or Reject and Pivot.
Run all three in sequence for a fresh area, or jump straight to Phase 2 or Phase 3 when the user already has an idea in hand. Every verdict here is advisory. The user picks the surviving direction; this skill never auto-rejects and never proceeds to a downstream skill on its own.
Shared Rules (all three phases)
Advisory, never gatekeeping. Scores, deltas, and verdicts surface to the user. The user chooses. This skill never auto-rejects a candidate, never flips claim STATUS, and never mutates .writing/ state without the user's choice.
Never fabricate. Do not invent papers, arXiv IDs, DOIs, venues, years, or numbers to justify or to sink an idea. Mark an unconfirmed reference [UNVERIFIED] and keep it visible. Fabrication at the idea stage contaminates every downstream stage. Full protocol in citation discipline. This is the one mechanical line that stays hard: strong models still invent citations, so evidence integrity is checked, not trusted.
Retrieval is delegated, not rebuilt. This skill judges ideas. It does not run its own search backend. Whenever a phase needs prior work, a landscape survey, or a per-claim search, delegate to the merged retrieval skill: