pi-progress-synthesis

name	pi-progress-synthesis
description	Create or revise PI-, collaborator-, or lab-facing scientific progress updates, slide narratives, and research briefs that connect goals, evidence, caveats, and decisions. Use when an agent must synthesize experiments for a scientific audience, prepare a lab meeting or progress review, or turn results into a decision-focused story.

PI Progress Synthesis

Establish The Audience Question

• Identify the scientific decision, ambiguity, or reframing the audience can help with.
• Assume the audience is scientifically sophisticated but does not remember project-local jargon, run names, or benchmark contracts.
• Define the goal, data or model setup, constraints, and what would count as progress before presenting results.
• Keep the update science-facing. Omit scheduler details, agent operations, debugging chronology, and other process breadcrumbs unless operations are the subject.

Build The Story In Causal Order

Use this sequence unless the evidence requires a different one:

1. Problem: why the project exists and which failure matters.
2. Baseline: the nearest fair reference or control.
3. Mechanism: what changed and why it might address the failure.
4. Evidence: quantitative readouts plus representative positive and negative examples.
5. Interpretation: what the evidence supports and what remains ambiguous.
6. Decision: what should continue, stop, or be tested next.

Put the motivating failure before the proposed solution. When a simpler explanation such as more data, more capacity, or longer training is plausible, name it and explain what evidence separates it from the proposed mechanism.

Make Claims Proportional To Evidence

• Separate observation from interpretation.
• State why the selected baseline is the nearest fair comparison.
• Report denominators, split or source boundaries, and important cohort differences.
• Include negative and broken paths when they changed the decision.
• Name the strongest confound and one observation that would weaken the current interpretation.
• Do not imply that one failed extension falsifies an unchanged successful parent method.
• Prefer “suggests” or “falsifies this mechanism” over a stronger claim unless the evidence supports it.

Put Evidence Next To The Claim

• Show representative visual evidence inline when the claim is spatial, temporal, structural, or qualitative.
• Include both a current positive example and a consequential failure example when sample quality affects the decision.
• State clearly when a positive example is an upper bound, diagnostic bypass, or manually assisted result rather than the deployable path.
• Describe what each figure actually demonstrates; do not substitute the expected theoretical failure for the visible artifact.
• Put a short interpretation beside or below every result figure: what changed, what improved or worsened, and which decision it affects.
• Include artifact paths only when they help the audience inspect the evidence. Omit logs, manifests, configs, and run roots unless audit provenance was requested.

Choose The Right Medium

• Preserve the user’s requested format. If no format is specified, use a short slide deck for visually driven updates and a concise prose brief for primarily conceptual decisions.
• Use the quarto-presentations skill when creating or revising a Quarto deck.
• Prefer one claim per slide, speaker notes for talk track, and plots over dense metric tables.
• Use tables only when exact mappings or comparisons are clearer than prose or a figure.
• Avoid meta headings about the intended audience or document-making process.
• Translate acronyms and project-local benchmark names into plain language before using them.

Invite Scientific Reframing

• Describe the observed problem, constraints, evidence, and remaining ambiguity before recommending a path.
• Do not present a narrow menu of agent-generated options as though it exhausts the scientific possibilities.
• End with a small set of direct questions, decisions, or falsifiers whose answers would change the plan.

Final Check

Before delivery, verify that the update:

• explains why the work matters before describing the method;
• connects every major claim to evidence;
• distinguishes measured results from interpretation;
• includes the nearest baseline, caveats, and negative evidence;
• makes the decision impact explicit;
• removes low-information process detail; and
• leaves the audience with one memorable status and one clear scientific question.