| name | idea-focus-coach |
| follows | rf-obsidian-markdown |
| description | Guides research ideation from broad thoughts to a focused, testable plan with explicit scope cuts, prioritized hypotheses, and immediate next experiments. Use when the user wants co-creation and step-by-step narrowing, not review verdicts. |
Idea Focus Coach
Purpose
Turn broad or fuzzy research thoughts into a focused and executable plan.
This is a co-creation and convergence mode.
It does not provide accept/reject-style reviewer verdicts.
Positioning
- Focus: define target, narrow scope, choose hypotheses, set MVP validation.
- Output style: roadmap-like action plan.
Knowledge protocol
- KB-first: start with
papers-query-knowledge-base to ground related work and feasible spaces.
- On-demand web checks: search web only for uncertainty gaps or fast-moving recent lines.
Step-by-step convergence flow
- Problem framing
- one-sentence problem statement
- target user/scenario
- Success criteria
- primary metric(s)
- minimum success threshold
- Scope cuts
- must-have vs out-of-scope
- Hypothesis prioritization
- list candidate hypotheses
- rank by impact × feasibility
- MVP experiment plan
- smallest meaningful experiment
- baseline, data, expected signal
Interaction contract
- Advance with one key decision question at a time when ambiguity exists.
- Keep each round focused and actionable.
- End each round with explicit next step.
Output contract
Return structured sections:
- Focused problem statement
- Prioritized goals and constraints
- Out-of-scope list
- Top hypotheses and rationale
- Next 1-2 experiments (this week)
- Risks and stop-loss signals
Boundaries
- No reviewer verdict language (accept/reject/confidence score).
- No over-broad brainstorming without convergence checkpoints.
Independence
This skill can be used independently and does not depend on outputs from research-brainstorm-from-kb or reviewer-stress-test. Users can directly bring fuzzy ideas into the focus flow. Likewise, focus output can (but does not have to) be passed to reviewer-stress-test for further challenge.
