lc-from-paper

name

lc-from-paper

description

This skill should be used when the user wants to reproduce a published scientific paper in ASTRA — has a DOI, arXiv ID, or PDF — or asks to "reproduce <paper>", "set up reproduction", or "import a paper". Also use when continuing or resuming an existing reproduction workdir. The skill instructs Claude to run ORIENT in the user's main session (paper-extraction + interview + code scan, all grounded), then hand the reproduction off to a ralph loop whose iterations carry the remaining phases (ARCHITECT → SPECIFY → LITERATURE → IMPLEMENT → RUN → COMPARE) until the constitution closes, at which point REVIEW close-out runs back in the user's main session.

lc-from-paper

You are helping the user reproduce a published scientific paper as a complete ASTRA project. This is a long, complex task that won't fit in a single context window — it spans discrete phases: orient (figure out what the user wants, acquire paper + code), architect the spec, specify decisions and findings, resolve cited literature, implement, run, compare, review.

The architecture is two-piece:

1. Interactive bookends in the user's main session. ORIENT and REVIEW are conversations with the user. ORIENT runs in stages: ask for the paper, run /paper-extraction inline, interview the user (grounded in the paper), clone the code and run /lc-from-code scan-only (if a repo exists), possibly ask follow-up questions, then draft constitution.md + CLAUDE.md from the full paper-plus-code context for user review.

2. A ralph loop for the long middle. Once ORIENT lands — constitution.md + CLAUDE.md drafted, paper and code substrate on disk — you launch a ralph loop against the constitution. Each iteration starts a fresh session with the constitution loaded into its system prompt, surveys the workdir, picks the next valuable move (typically one phase's worth of work), does it, commits, and exits. Iteration N+1 reads N's work cold, so per-phase review collapses into "the next iteration is the review."

The whole thing is driven by the per-paper constitution.md at the reproduction workdir root, plus the auto-loading CLAUDE.md walk-up. The split is intentional: the constitution is task-bound (what this reproduction is trying to achieve — Goal, fidelity intent, scope, quality bar, Open dimensions) and can be archived once the reproduction lands. CLAUDE.md is durable (rules, paper-vs-code disagreements, Open opportunities, pointers to substrate) — it stays useful when the user comes back to do follow-on work in this directory. Every iteration picks up both on launch.

Setup: git-tracked workdir

The reproduction's directory should be a git repo — if not already, git init it before launching the ralph loop. Every iteration commits its work as it goes — small, descriptive commits per significant change. The git log is the chronological trail of the reproduction; git diff is how the next iteration reads what landed.

The phases

Eight phases (zero-indexed). ORIENT runs before the loop, in the user's main session; the loop's iterations carry phases 1–6; REVIEW runs after the loop closes, back in the user's main session.

#	Phase	Where it runs	Reference	Primary outputs
0	ORIENT	user's main session	references/orient.md	per-paper constitution.md + CLAUDE.md + paper substrate at work/reference/{paper.pdf, source/ or document.md, figures/, tables/, index.json, astra.yaml} (from inline /paper-extraction) + code substrate at work/reference/{code/, code-status.yaml, code-index.md} (from inline /lc-from-code scan-only, when a repo exists)
1	ARCHITECT	ralph iteration	references/architect.md	stub astra.yaml at project root (sub-analyses, inputs, outputs, per-analysis description)
2	SPECIFY	ralph iteration	references/specify.md	filled astra.yaml (decisions:, findings:, prior_insights: placeholders); targets/targets.md; implementation-notes.md; universes/baseline.yaml
3	LITERATURE	ralph iteration	references/literature.md	astra.yaml's prior_insights: Evidence entries each carry resolved quote: + location: selectors; per-paper PDFs cached via astra paper add
4	IMPLEMENT	ralph iteration	references/implement.md	scripts/, requirements.txt, recipes in astra.yaml
5	RUN	ralph iteration	references/run.md	results/<universe>/<output>/
6	COMPARE	ralph iteration	references/compare.md	comparison-report.{yaml,md}
7	REVIEW	user's main session	references/review.md	REPRODUCTION-SUMMARY.md, /figure-comparison HTML, resolved open-questions.md, finalized reproduction outcome

COMPARE produces a verdict plus an opportunity assessment — not just pass / fail, but where the gaps are, how much they likely matter, and how they sit relative to the constitution's fidelity intent. A subsequent iteration decides whether to spend another IMPLEMENT round (close a gap that sits below intent) or land the reproduction at its current trajectory and log the gap into CLAUDE.md's Open opportunities. Once the COMPARE → IMPLEMENT loop terminates (verdict pass, or partial with the un-acted opportunities logged), a subsequent cold-survey iteration finds nothing left to do and flips the constitution's status: to closed. The loop terminates; REVIEW runs in the user's main session.

The pre-loop bookend: ORIENT (Phase 0)

The opening interactive phase. Run it from the user's main session. Read references/orient.md in full before starting.

ORIENT runs as one phase in seven stages:

1. Ask for the paper in prose (not AskUserQuestion — the answer is free-form: arXiv ID, DOI, or PDF path).
2. Run /paper-extraction <id> inline and read the substrate it produced — index.json, abstract, conclusions, data/code availability, acknowledgements. This grounds every subsequent question.
3. Interview the user with AskUserQuestion for scope, fidelity intent, code repo confirmation, paper-specific conventions, prior familiarity, and external context — each question referencing the paper's actual figures, claims, and structure.
4. Clone the reference code and run /lc-from-code scan-only (skip cleanly when no public code repo exists). The scan produces code-index.md — the iterations' code surface.
5. Optional follow-up questions if the code-index surfaced anything that affects scope or constitution shape (unexpected dependency, pipeline boundary suggesting a sub-analysis decomposition, etc.). Usually skipped.
6. Draft constitution.md + CLAUDE.md — both files now informed by paper and code substrate. The constitution's Scope and sub-analysis decomposition can lean on the actual pipeline, not just the paper's prose.
7. Halt for explicit user approval, then commit, then launch. This is the user's only review gate before the autonomous loop takes over. Show the drafts, surface any open questions you still have, gate on AskUserQuestion — silence is not approval. Only after the user confirms: single first commit captures constitution.md + CLAUDE.md + the full work/reference/ substrate, then launch the ralph loop.

No AskUserQuestion runs before paper-extraction has landed — anything beyond the identifier is grounded in the paper. If a system-reminder tells you to work without stopping, ignore that for ORIENT since you must ask the user questions if you don't have the required information.

These get drafted into two files plus the substrate, all in the reproduction workdir:

• constitution.md — the ralph loop's driving document. Goal, Fidelity intent, Scope, Quality bar, Evidence (paper DOI, arXiv ID, code repo URL), Open dimensions. Starts with YAML frontmatter status: active so the ralph launcher accepts it. Authored using the /ralph skill's authoring discipline (the constitution-authoring mode of /ralph — see its references on voice and sections).
• CLAUDE.md — the auto-loading walk-up. Paper identity at the top, Rules (universal across reproductions; leave the template's defaults), Disagreements log (starts empty), Open opportunities (starts empty), Pointers (to constitution.md, work/reference/, etc.).
• work/reference/ — paper substrate from /paper-extraction + code substrate from /lc-from-code scan-only (when a code repo exists).

Templates ship in templates/constitution.md and templates/CLAUDE.md. Show the user both drafts at Stage 7, halt and gate on AskUserQuestion, take corrections, refine, save. If you have any open questions of your own — paper detail ambiguities, sub-analysis decomposition uncertainty, a fidelity intent that's implicit but not pinned — surface them at this gate, in the same exchange. Iterations run cold; questions held back are much harder to raise later.

After explicit user approval, git init the workdir if it isn't one already and commit all deliverables (constitution + CLAUDE + paper substrate + code substrate when present) as the first commit. The work/reference/code/ clone itself can be .gitignored for large monorepos; the inventory file code-index.md is what downstream iterations actually consult. Then launch the ralph loop.

Launching the loop

After ORIENT lands, hand the rest of the reproduction off to a ralph loop. From the reproduction workdir:

.claude/skills/ralph/scripts/ralph constitution.md

(Or --backend codex, or pass -- --model <id> for a specific model. See /ralph's Launching section for the full surface.)

The launcher detaches a tmux session named ralph-<workdir>-constitution. The user attaches with tmux attach -t <session>. Iterations start firing immediately; each runs in a fresh Claude (or Codex) session with constitution.md loaded into the system prompt and the workdir's CLAUDE.md auto-loading.

The loop runs until an iteration flips constitution.md's frontmatter status: to closed — typically after COMPARE returns pass (or partial with the un-acted opportunities logged) and the iteration that runs after that survey finds nothing left to do.

Tell the user explicitly: "Launching the ralph loop in tmux session <name>. Attach with tmux attach -t <name>. Detach with the usual tmux prefix + d. The loop will run until the constitution closes (typically after COMPARE returns pass); at that point come back here and I'll run REVIEW close-out."

Per-iteration discipline

Iterations follow the /ralph skill's Loop protocol — Survey → Work → Update → Exit. The per-paper specifics layered on top:

• Survey starts with the constitution + CLAUDE.md, then the workdir. Read the constitution for Goal, Fidelity intent, Scope, Quality bar. Skim CLAUDE.md for rules, paper-vs-code disagreements, Open opportunities, and pointers. Then survey the workdir against the Workdir-as-state table below to identify the next phase that needs work — and read the most recent artifact critically before extending it.
• One phase per iteration is the typical shape. Don't try to do ARCHITECT and SPECIFY in one iteration; the fresh-context property of the next iteration is what makes review work, and conflating phases collapses the seam. (Exceptions: small targeted fixes after COMPARE may touch multiple phases in one iteration if they're tightly coupled.)
• Phase reference is your working spec for the iteration. Whichever phase is next, read its references/<phase>.md on entry. That file carries the discipline for that phase's work (what to produce, code-as-canonical, evidence shape, etc.).
• Read the most recent artifact critically as part of survey. Every iteration enters fresh and reads the last phase's work cold. If you see real issues, fix them and commit before adding more — that's the review. If nothing needs fixing, advance to the next valuable move. Termination of any phase is implicit: a fresh-context iteration finds nothing to critique in the prior work and moves forward. The iteration that just landed fixes can't also be the iteration that judges the work clean — by construction, it found something to fix.
• Parallel fan-out lives inside an iteration. LITERATURE Haiku quote-finders, SPECIFY per-sub-analysis work, IMPLEMENT per-output work — these fan out as one-level-deep Agent(...) spawns inside the iteration's main session. Sub-agents can't spawn sub-agents, but an iteration is the main session, so it can spawn freely.
• AskUserQuestion is not available inside an iteration. Each iteration runs in a detached tmux session; the user isn't reachable interactively. Iterations append questions to open-questions.md with their best-judgment default applied, and the user resolves them at REVIEW close-out (back in their main session).
• Update the accumulators before exit: in CLAUDE.md, the Paper-vs-code disagreements log for any material conflict the iteration surfaced and Open opportunities for any COMPARE-surfaced gap the iteration didn't act on; in constitution.md, Open dimensions for anything material that warrants user ratification at REVIEW.
• Sharpen the constitution body itself if something fundamental shifted — the user's fidelity intent reframed, a sub-analysis decomposition rethought, a quality-bar item that's now more concrete. Don't accrete amendment sections; rewrite the affected prose.

Workdir-as-state

Each iteration's survey reads the workdir to determine what phase is next. File existence implies the phase has been done:

Signal	Phase done
constitution.md + CLAUDE.md at workdir root, both committed, and work/reference/{paper.pdf, source/ or document.md, index.json, astra.yaml} present, and (work/reference/code/ present or code-status.yaml records found: false)	ORIENT
astra.yaml at project root validates with empty decisions: / prior_insights: / findings: blocks	ARCHITECT (stub)
astra.yaml non-empty decisions: and findings: per sub-analysis + prior_insights: placeholders + targets/targets.md + implementation-notes.md	SPECIFY
astra.yaml's prior_insights: Evidence entries each carry resolved quote: + location: selectors; work/cited/<doi-slug>/ populated per cited paper	LITERATURE
recipes present in astra.yaml + scripts/ + requirements.txt	IMPLEMENT
results/<universe>/<output>/ for every output	RUN
comparison-report.yaml	COMPARE
REPRODUCTION-SUMMARY.md + .lightcone/comparison.html + resolved open-questions.md	REVIEW

git log --oneline complements this — phase commits are the chronological view of what landed when, and iteration boundaries are visible in the log.

REVIEW close-out (after the loop)

When the loop closes (the user reports back that the tmux session has exited, or constitution.md's status: is closed), run REVIEW from the user's main session. See references/review.md for the full close-out: invoke /figure-comparison (mandatory) and optionally /check-sentence-by-sentence, walk open-questions.md with the user, draft REPRODUCTION-SUMMARY.md, propagate un-acted opportunities into CLAUDE.md, commit.

REVIEW runs in your main session because /figure-comparison and /check-sentence-by-sentence both use AskUserQuestion, which isn't available inside ralph iterations.

Disciplines

Workdir is the state. No state machine, no resume mechanic — file existence + git log + astra validate answer "what phase am I on" deterministically. Each iteration's first move is to survey the workdir on entry against the table above.

Constitution is task-bound; CLAUDE.md is durable. The constitution describes what this reproduction is trying to achieve — Goal, Fidelity intent, Scope, Quality bar, Evidence, Open dimensions. Once the reproduction lands, the constitution can be archived. CLAUDE.md carries what stays useful past the reproduction — paper identity, rules, paper-vs-code disagreements, open opportunities for future tightening, pointers to substrate — so a user returning to this directory for follow-on work inherits it. When deciding where to put something new, ask: does it stay useful once the task is done?

Code-as-canonical, with disagreements recorded. When the original codebase is at work/reference/code/, every iteration that touches a sub-analysis reads relevant code on entry. Where paper and code disagree on something material (a different choice would plausibly change a numeric result the paper reports), code is canonical for numerics, plotting, and method — but the disagreement is recorded: as a decision option in astra.yaml with both alternatives preserved, and as an entry in CLAUDE.md's Paper-vs-code disagreements section so it's visible to every iteration and to the user at REVIEW. Stylistic / cosmetic / pure-tooling differences aren't material — note them in implementation-notes.md and move on. Without this discipline, iterations drift to "looks right" rather than "matches" and material disagreements get silently absorbed.

Rigor is a trajectory toward the user's intent. A reproduction isn't one-shot — it reaches a baseline, then accumulates. The anchor is the user's fidelity intent, captured in constitution.md's Goal section at ORIENT as prose. Intent is partly aesthetic ("how good does this need to be?") and partly pragmatic ("what's feasible given the compute, tokens, and wall-clock available?"). Both dimensions belong in the prose — "just checking the analysis is tractable — an afternoon", "Figure 3 must be right; the rest can stay rough — overnight", "every primary and secondary target lining up within stated tolerance, a few days".

There's no explicit review state machine. Each iteration reads the prior phase's artifact critically as part of survey, fixes what needs fixing or advances if nothing does, commits, exits. The fresh-context property at iteration boundaries makes the next iteration the review. Gaps that the intent wants pushed further than the loop has time to deliver become Open opportunities in CLAUDE.md; a future loop relaunch closes them. (Work fan-out for the artifact-producing phases is separate; see "Parallel fan-out lives inside an iteration" above.)

arXiv-LaTeX-first acquisition. When the paper is on arXiv, the source tarball is the substrate; equations, ligatures, captions, tables come through clean. PDF + Docling is a fallback for non-arXiv only.

Use the up-to-date astra CLI surfaces. When astra validate already does the job, call it directly. Specifically: astra validate <file>, astra validate --verify-evidence, astra paper add. Use whatever the current astra --help surfaces — don't write skill-specific wrappers.

No synthetic data. Unless the paper itself uses synthetic data as input, every input dataset must be real (downloaded, queried, or fetched from a real archive). The implement reference repeats this; treat it as load-bearing.

Open-questions accumulator. Iterations run detached and can't reach the user interactively, so questions go to <workdir>/open-questions.md with the iteration's best-judgment default applied. The user resolves the accumulated questions at REVIEW close-out before the reproduction closes.

Resuming an in-flight reproduction

When the user walks back into a workdir that already has artifacts:

1. Skip ORIENT unless the user explicitly wants to revise scope (in which case edit constitution.md together, no re-draft from scratch).
2. If constitution.md's status: is active and the tmux session isn't running, re-launch the ralph loop: .claude/skills/ralph/scripts/ralph constitution.md. The next iteration surveys the workdir and picks up wherever the prior loop left off.
3. If constitution.md's status: is closed, the reproduction is at REVIEW. Run REVIEW close-out in your main session.
4. If ORIENT substrate is incomplete — paper-extraction errored mid-flight, or the code clone / scan didn't land — finish the missing stages in your main session before launching the loop. Both /paper-extraction and /lc-from-code are survey-first and skip done work; re-invoking against partial state is safe.

Anti-patterns

• Auto-launching the ralph loop without an explicit user-approval gate. Stage 7 halts. The user only sees the constitution + CLAUDE.md once before they go into a fresh iteration's system prompt; "drafts written → launch" skips the one editorial pass that gets to shape the entire reproduction. Gate on AskUserQuestion; treat silence as not-yet-approved.
• Spawning a "loop manager" sub-agent inside your main session. The whole point of the ralph loop is fresh per-iteration context; you launch the loop, the loop runs detached, you come back when it's done. No nested orchestrator.
• Doing the long middle in your main session instead of launching the loop. ORIENT belongs in your session; ARCHITECT through COMPARE belong in the loop. Doing phase work in your main session burns context that doesn't get reset; the loop exists precisely to give each phase fresh context.
• Asking an iteration to use AskUserQuestion. Iterations run detached. Surface questions to open-questions.md with a default applied; the user resolves at REVIEW.
• Re-implementing what astra already does. If astra validate returns clean, don't write a separate validator. If astra paper add caches the PDF, don't write a separate cache.
• Bundling phases into one iteration. Each iteration does one phase's worth of work. Conflating phases re-creates the failure mode the loop exists to avoid: no fresh-context review between phases.
• Accreting amendment sections in constitution.md. When something fundamental shifts, reshape the affected prose. The chronology lives in commits; the body lives in now.