idea-evaluator

Idea Evaluator

Overview

This skill evaluates a preliminary research idea from the combined

perspective of a top-venue reviewer and an experienced advisor. It

scores the idea against five improvement dimensions from the

idea-generation guide (Higher, Faster, Stronger, Cheaper,

Broader), matches the idea's lifecycle against the user's actual

capability and available hours per week, probes whether the idea has

paradigm-shift potential, flags fatal flaws, and returns one of three

verdicts: Strong Accept, Accept with Revisions, or Reject and Pivot.

The goal is to kill weak ideas before the student invests months, and to

shape promising-but-underdeveloped ideas into stronger forms before

writing begins.

When to use this skill

• The user has a draft idea and asks whether it is worth pursuing.
• The user asks for novelty check, feasibility assessment, or scoring.
• Before the user commits to a paper scope or starts implementation.
• The user is comparing two or three candidate ideas and needs a

structured trade-off.

• The user suspects scope creep and wants an external check.
• The user mentions 'evaluate this idea', 'score this idea', 'assess

feasibility', or 'is this a good research direction'.

When NOT to use this skill

• The user has already implemented the idea and is writing the paper.

Use intro-drafter, tech-paper-template, or

benchmark-paper-template (separate plugin) instead.

• The user explicitly wants brainstorming of new ideas from scratch.

Use plain conversation; see handbook 2.3 for a disruptive-innovation

playbook.

• The user asks for review of an existing manuscript. Use

pre-submission-reviewer.

• The user asks to evaluate a benchmark contribution specifically.

Use benchmark-paper-template (separate plugin) in targeted mode.

Core procedure

Step 1: First impression and paper-type positioning

Read the user's idea description. In one paragraph, state whether the

idea reads as Novel Problem, Novel Method, or New Setting. Is the

story compelling in one sentence? If you cannot write that sentence,

the idea itself is probably not yet clear enough for evaluation; ask

the user to restate.

While restating, classify the research paradigm **by method, not by

department name**: experiments, benchmarks, ablations, or model

architectures mean STEM (continue with the five dimensions and fatal

flaws below); text analysis, archives, or conceptual argument mean

humanities; surveys, interviews, statistics, or fieldwork mean

empirical social science; regressions, IV, DID, RDD, or panel data

mean finance or economics; statutes, cases, or doctrine mean law.

See: references/domain-evaluation-frameworks.md for the substitute

five-dimension frameworks and fatal-flaw substitutions used by the

non-STEM paradigms. When the paradigm is unclear, ask one question:

"is the core method experiments, surveys, text analysis, or

theoretical derivation?"

Step 2: Fatal-flaws audit (early gate)

See: references/fatal-flaws.md for the ten canonical fatal flaws,

each with a detection rule and a defense strategy.

Run the fatal-flaws audit before the scoring steps rather than

after them. Identify at most two fatal flaws. For each, state the

flaw, cite the detection rule, and recommend a concrete defense.

**Ground the novelty flaw (F1) in real retrieval whenever the

environment has a literature-search capability** (a scholarly search

tool, web search over scholarly indexes, or shell access to public

APIs). Extract two or three keyword groups from the idea (core method

plus domain; mechanism plus task; technique plus benchmark), search,

and name the three to five closest published works with title, authors,

and year. For each, state which axis actually differs: the object acted

on, the mechanism, the input granularity, or the problem setting. A

similar title alone never establishes duplication; duplication requires

failing to find even one differing axis. Retrieval results support

metadata-level judgments only (who did what, where); never quote

numbers or method details from search snippets. And "not found" does

not prove novelty: report it as "no directly overlapping work retrieved

under these keywords". With no retrieval capability, label the novelty

judgment "unverified; literature check required".

A data-refuted core mechanism is an automatic CRITICAL. If the

user's own reported data or attachments already show the core mechanism

matched or beaten by a baseline or simple control, lock the verdict to

Reject and Pivot; write no defense and invent no optimistic threshold.

See: references/fatal-flaws.md, the data-refuted section, for the exact

boundary between "refuted by data" and "merely untested".

Short-circuit rule. If any fatal flaw is tagged CRITICAL in the

severity taxonomy (single-handedly causes rejection, unfixable

within the lifecycle), stop here and emit the verdict directly:

• Verdict: Reject and Pivot.
• Output sections 1 (First impression), 2 (Fatal flaws with the

CRITICAL flaw), and 7 (Verdict with the flaw-driven rationale)

only.

• Do not run the five-dimension scoring, paradigm-shift probe,

feasibility check, or integrity gate. Those would be decoration

on a rejection.

If no CRITICAL flaw is found, continue to Step 3.

Step 3: Lifecycle and capability matching

See: references/lifecycle-capability-matching.md for the six-category

lifecycle matrix, capability self-assessment rubric, and mismatch

recovery strategies.

Map the idea onto one of six categories (Application, Foundational

Theory, Cross-Disciplinary, Frontier Exploration, Data-Intensive,

Innovative Technique). Match against the user's declared capability

(effective hours per week, skill depth, theoretical versus applied

strength). Output a mismatch flag if lifecycle is shorter than the

user's realistic execution window.

Step 4: Five-dimension scoring

See: references/five-dimensions.md for each dimension's entry

strategies, scoring rubric, and worked examples.

Score the idea on each of:

• Higher: effectiveness and accuracy gains.
• Faster: efficiency and cost reduction.
• Stronger: robustness, noise tolerance, generalisation.
• Cheaper: data, annotation, or solution cost reduction.
• Broader: cross-domain transplantation or unification.

Score each 1-10 with explicit evidence from the user's stated

contribution. Identify the two or three dimensions where the idea

has the highest ceiling and recommend emphasising those in the paper.

Scoring discipline: start every dimension at 5 and justify movement.

Two kinds of grounds move a score up, and both count: measured results

the user reported (quote them), or a mechanism argument that holds up

(label the score "mechanism-based, not yet confirmed by data"). A

solid, untested mechanism can reach 8 or 9 with that label plus a

named validation experiment; do not systematically cap untested ideas.

A dimension with neither data nor mechanism stays at 5 with "no

grounds given". Watch attribution: when an impressive gain plausibly

comes from a peripheral factor (routing, post-processing, a stronger

base model, favorable samples), cap that dimension until an ablation

isolates the core mechanism. The scoring reference's final two

sections cover both rules in detail.

For non-STEM paradigms, score the substitute dimensions from

references/domain-evaluation-frameworks.md instead, under the same

discipline.

Step 5: Paradigm-shift probe

See: references/paradigm-shift-probe.md for the four probing principles

(First Principles, Elephant in the Room, Technology Cycle, Hamming's

Rule) and the cross-reference to handbook section 2.3 when deeper

disruptive-innovation exploration is needed.

Test the idea against four questions:

1. Does it challenge a hidden assumption the field takes for granted?
2. Does it address an elephant-in-the-room problem everyone sees but

nobody wants to touch?

1. Does it ride a technology-cycle shift (for example, LLMs making a

previously impractical approach now feasible)?

1. If this problem solved itself, would the field change meaningfully?

(Hamming's Rule)

Two or more yes answers means the idea has disruptive potential. Note

that, and recommend reading handbook 2.3 to deepen the thinking on

disruptive-innovation dimensions.

Step 6: Feasibility check

Against the user's stated resources (hardware, data access, team size,

engineering skills, timeline), assess:

• Compute risk: does the experiment fit on stated hardware?
• Data risk: is the required data accessible, or does it need

expensive annotation or private sources?

• Engineering risk: does the implementation match the user's skill

stack?

• Timeline risk: does the estimated end-to-end duration (coding,

experiments, writing, revision) fit within the idea's lifecycle?

If any risk is high, flag it explicitly with a suggested mitigation.

Step 7: Integrity gate

Before emitting the verdict, run the checks in the Integrity gate

section below.

Step 8: Final verdict

Issue one of three verdicts:

• Strong Accept: execute now. Two or more dimensions at 8+, no

fatal flaws, capability match green, lifecycle fit.

• Accept with Revisions: pivot the scope per recommendations

before starting. Some dimensions weak, fixable flaws, or lifecycle

mismatch that can be shortened.

• Reject and Pivot: do not pursue this version. Dominated by a

prior benchmark or method, unfixable capability mismatch, or more

than one fatal flaw.

When the high scores are mechanism-based rather than data-based,

qualify the verdict as "worth pursuing, pending the validation

experiment", and name that experiment in the top-three actions.

Emit the evaluation in the Output format below.

Integrity gate

Each bullet is tagged with an enforceability class. [inspection]

means the LLM can verify the bullet from the produced output alone.

[attestation] means the LLM states it has done the check, but the

user remains responsible for verification. [user-attest] means the

bullet is a user-side rule the skill cannot confirm.

Before returning the verdict:

1. [inspection] Every dimension score cites specific evidence

from the user's stated contribution; no score is "gut feeling".

1. [inspection] Feasibility claims reference the user's stated

resources, not generic assumptions.

1. [inspection] Novelty claims either cite specific prior work

or are labelled "unverified; literature check required".

1. [inspection] Fatal flaws are specific and actionable; "this

might not work" is not a flaw statement.

1. [inspection] Verdict is consistent with scoring: Strong

Accept requires at least two dimensions at 8+ and zero CRITICAL

flaws.

1. [inspection] Paradigm-shift claim cites which probing

question was answered positively.

1. [attestation] Lifecycle prediction is reasoned from the

field's recent pace; the user should sanity-check against their

own knowledge of the subfield before acting on it.

If any [inspection] check fails, downgrade the verdict and mark

the corresponding output section as "needs user attention". For

[attestation] bullets, the skill states the check was run and the

user confirms the result.

Run the gate silently. Do not print a per-gate pass or fail report;

a failure surfaces as a concrete finding inside the affected output

section, and the delivered evaluation stays free of internal

checking rituals.

Output format

1. First impression

• Paper type: <Novel Problem or Novel Method or New Setting>
• One-sentence story: <...>

2. Fatal-flaws audit (early gate)

| # | Flaw | Severity | Defense |

|---|---|---|---|

| 1 | ... | CRITICAL or MAJOR | ... |

*If any CRITICAL flaw is present, skip sections 3-6 and go to

section 7 with verdict Reject and Pivot.*

3. Lifecycle and capability match

| Aspect | User's input | Assessment |

|---|---|---|

| Idea category | ... | ... |

| Lifecycle | ... months | ... |

| Weekly effective hours | ... | ... |

| Fit | ... | Green or Yellow or Red |

4. Five-dimension radar

| Dimension | Score 1-10 | Evidence | Lift suggestion |

|---|---|---|---|

| Higher | ... | ... | ... |

| Faster | ... | ... | ... |

| Stronger | ... | ... | ... |

| Cheaper | ... | ... | ... |

| Broader | ... | ... | ... |

5. Paradigm-shift probe

| Probe | Yes or No | Rationale |

|---|---|---|

| First Principles | ... | ... |

| Elephant in the Room | ... | ... |

| Technology Cycle | ... | ... |

| Hamming's Rule | ... | ... |

Disruptive potential: <none, possible, strong>.

6. Feasibility

| Risk | Level | Mitigation |

|---|---|---|

| Compute | ... | ... |

| Data | ... | ... |

| Engineering | ... | ... |

| Timeline | ... | ... |

7. Verdict

<Strong Accept or Accept with Revisions or Reject and Pivot>

*(mechanism-based high scores: append "worth pursuing, pending the

validation experiment")*

Top three actions to take first:

1. ...
2. ...
3. ...